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Assemble To Order
Assemble to order (ATO) is a business strategy for companies that provide physical products. In ATO, products are made from a particular range of components that are manufactured in advance and left unassembled until a customer places an order. Once an order is placed, the components are put together to match the customer’s requirements. An example is computer hardware providers that stock a range of components and put them together as and when orders are received.
What Small and Midsize Businesses Need to Know About Assemble To Order
To have a successful ATO strategy, SMBs must commit to investing in large numbers of necessary components. The cost of buying these components in advance can be high, but for many SMBs, this is reclaimed via the relatively low cost of assembling pre-manufactured components into market-ready products.
Related terms
- Procurement
- Bill of Materials (BOM)
- Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)
- Smart Factory
- Strategic Sourcing
- Value-Added Reseller (VAR)
- Telematics
- Supply Chain
- Vendor
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Supply Chain Planning (SCP)
- Scanner
- SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition)
- Total Quality Management (TQM)
- Vendor Management
- Senpai
- Radio-frequency Identification (RFID)
- Loopback
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Electro Mobility (e-Mobility)
