Mass Customization
Mass customization has been defined as "producing
goods and services to meet individual customer's needs with near mass
production efficiency". Mass customization, in marketing, manufacturing,
and management, is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing
systems to produce custom output. Those systems combine the low unit
costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual
customization
Mass customization has also been defined as "a strategy that creates
value by some form of company-customer interaction at the fabrication
/ assembly stage of the operations level to create customized products
with production cost and monetary price similar to those of mass-produced
products".
In the book Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition
described this paradigm at the beginning of the 90s. It suggested a
business model that he called the 8-figure-path which describes the
process from invention to mass production to continuous improvement
to mass customization and back to invention.
Described were four types of mass customization:
 Collaborative
mass customization - firms talk to individual customers to determine
the precise product offering that best serves the customer's needs.
Adaptive
mass customization - firms produce a standardized product, but this
product is customizable in the hands of the end-user.
Transparent
mass customization - firms provide individual customers with unique
products, without explicitly telling them that the products are customized.
In this case there is a need to accurately assess customer needs.
Cosmetic
mass customization - firms produce a standardized physical product,
but market it to different customers in unique ways.
Many implementations of mass customization are operational today, such
as software-based product configurations which make it possible to add
and/or change functionalities of a core product or to build fully custom
enclosures from scratch.
This degree of mass customization
has only seen limited adoption, however. If an enterprise's marketing
department offers individual products it doesn't often mean that a product
is produced individually, but rather that similar variants of the same
mass produced item are available.
Companies which have succeeded
with mass-customization business models tend to supply purely electronic
products.
Many industries have found
that lengthy supply-chains, and the economics of configurability do
not allow them to economically offer mass customization. Famously, some
of the early businesses attempting mass customization went out of business.
In 1999 boosters of the
mass customization trend proffered Cannondale as the exemplar of the
new model. For instance, a 1999 report touted Cannondale's ability to
mass customize can configure over 8 million different frame and color
variations in its bicycles."
Although the company's
subsequent bankruptcy in 2003 was blamed on other causes the mass customization
"revolution" certainly failed to save it, and it was dropped as a role
model by business gurus.
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