Mass customization: trends and research.

Fuerstner, Igor ; Anisic, Zoran ; Cosic, Ilija 等

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper presents an overview of some of the current research results in mass customization.

Global competition is forcing producing companies to change their activities from a seller point of view towards a buyer point of view, what results in a drastic increase in the number of product variants and costs.

To maintain there competitiveness, companies are modularizing their products and introducing platform concepts, and this transfer from no customizable products to modular products that involve individual customer variants is one of the most important industrial strategies nowadays.

The recent development of IT technology enabled the software based product configuration systems that support the process of customized product development. They compose customer specific solutions using the modules based on the customer's requirements.

2. OPEN FRAMEWORK FOR PRODUCT CONFIGURATION SYSTEMS

Many companies develop their own configuration systems, so the required rules for combining product components or modules, as well as the design of the entire product are usually statically implemented in the configuration system. As a result of this approach, any change concerning the product or the system itself, requires comprehensive changes in the configuration system's source code. This direct conversion of the rules into source code also leads to more dependency on software engineers, because other users cannot edit or change the configuration rules. This can be a large psychological barrier for many companies due to the necessity to share know-how with external persons, knowledge engineers and computer scientists. The other problem is the unclear structure of the rules, which leads to hard serviceability. These problems lead towards a development of an open framework that would allow the creation and maintenance of different individual product configuration systems by the engineers themselves without high dependency on computer scientists.

The product configuration solution should include virtual 3D model of the product, standardized services for the support of the system introduction to a company, accurate assessment of costs and profit, unitized software system, which can be tailored to customers and open communication structure between the involved systems (Abramovici at al. 2007).

3. THE ROLE OF CUSTOMER IN MASS CUSTOMIZATION

As the practice and research of mass customization develops, there is increasing understanding of how it can be implemented in terms of manufacturing capability and expertise, data transfer and management, the implementation of business systems, and the development of product architectures.

The so called 'solution space' is defined, as a conceptual 'container' for the matrix of product possibilities that are made available for any given mass customized product to a customer co-designer, established through the assessment of product architecture, range, overall company strategy and manufacturing capability.

Beside this, the added importance of connection with customers is likely to have an equal, if not greater impact on future working methods and technologies. Mass customization by its very nature consists not only of the customizable product offering but of the co-design experience. This experience differs from purchasing a mass produced product as it requires engagement and participation in the creation process, it is this participation that changes the role of the customer from consumer of a product to a partner in a process of adding value. There is a need to develop a conceptual model for mass customized product offerings that encompasses not only the current understanding of 'solution space', but also the wider aspects relating to the co-design experience steaming from the customer co-designers emotional connection with the product and purchasing process (Jordan, 2000, Herd et al., 2007).

4. CONFIGURABLE PRODUCT PLATFORM

The main driving force for platform based development and manufacturing is the possibility to combine customization with economy of scale or the effect off production process in which an increase in the scale of the produced component causes a decrease in the average cost of each unit. The means to achieve this is reuse of common resources (common parts) in multiple customized product variants. By doing this it is possible to create new product variants without having to develop all of its contained parts, just the ones that are variant specific. The rest can be used from already existing products or from a common core of parts in a product family or in different involved families of different brands--the product platform. A product platform is a set of parameters, features, and/or components that remain constant from product to product within a given product family. Configuration of product variants is thus achieved by combining the parts in the platform with variant specific parts.

Although much have been gained with this strategy it has its limitations, and it needs to be further developed in order to prevent the amount of part numbers to be managed in a developing and manufacturing company to grow out of hand. What is needed is an integrating tool that handles all knowledge related to the whole platform system, the relations between contained items and the rules governing the use of the contained knowledge for different purposes during the platform lifecycle. (Johannesson & Gedell, 2007).

5. OPTIMUM DEGREE OF CUTOMIZATION

Usually, the literature regards the degree of customization as how early or how far the customers are integrated in the product's production cycle, or more generally in it's life cycle. The point at which the customers' involvement or input starts is referred to as the "Order Decoupling Point". The earlier the customers' involvement in the product's life cycle is, the higher is the degree of customization. On the other hand, the closer the customer involvement is to the final product and distribution stage, the lower is the degree of customization. The level of customization can be also viewed from a supply chain perspective. A higher degree of customization would entail direct customer involvement starting backwards at the first tier suppliers, while a lower degree of customization occurs when customer involvement is close to the retailers or end users. The stage at which the customers' actual input integrates into the system is referred to as the "Stockholding Decoupling Point".

However, there is a need to determine a certain degree of customization concerning the possible increase of the market share and premium price, while lowering costs, risk level, time to market, and other.

To achieve this, determining the degree of customization from a product structural design perspective is necessary. That is, the degree of customization is determined by breaking down a product into a number of modules or components, and then examining the various options for each module or the extent to which some features within each module can be changed if required (Spahi et al., 2007).

6. CUSTOMIZATION OF SERVICES; TOURISM OFFERINGS

The approach of mass customization offers gain to both consumers and manufacturers of products, but it also has huge potential in the field of services. Tourism, as one of the most propulsive industrial branch, has recently become a very fertile soil to implement the technologies and approaches of mass customization.

The reduction of interest for solid arrangements with fixed and predefined content is noticeable, and the public wants more freedom in the choice of arrangements, which allows users to adapt and correlate their needs and wants with the offer and the possibilities of the destination to which they are traveling to. Large and successful agencies have always been ready to please the special needs and wants of their clients, but that usually went with a much higher price than that of a standard service (Taylor Made Customization), which a normal consumer cannot afford. Global increase of investments in tourism, and with that, the increase of the competition between the tourist service providers, leads towards finding new, hidden market places, which can secure significant profit with the help of widely used information technologies.

The main aspects considering the implementation of mass customization in tourism are therefore interesting for deeper research (Anisic et al., 2008).

7. CONCLUSION

The implementation of modular, standard product configuration systems is much easier and more acceptable than the existing ones. The advantages of the approach are the high quality of the configured productse, the improved serviceability of the knowledge base without the need of involving external engineers and computer scientists. Additionally the flexibility of the software system makes it possible to adopt changes to the knowledge base very fast and easily.

The product envelope model that defines the role and the position of the customer in the mass customization system in its current form is useful in helping to frame the reflection of an experience, but further work is currently being undertaken to both develop the model and structured methods for its use.

The main driving force for platform based development and manufacturing is the possibility to combine customization with economy of scale. This is in practice achieved by reuse of common parts, i.e. the platform, in different customized variants. Configuration of product variants is achieved by combining the parts in the platform with variant specific parts. This strategy has its limitations as it drives an increase of part numbers to be managed in a developing and manufacturing company to grow out of hand. In order to address these problems a new more system oriented and abstract knowledge based approach is needed. The platform model and modeling approach have the potential to enable more efficient product customization without driving growth of part numbers to be managed and to provide more efficient means for reuse of product knowledge for platform development.

In a mass customization system, personalized products can have different choices and customizable features with varying extents. It is important to be able to determine what scope of choices would work best for the organization. Not only that, but it is important to know which set of modules, components and/or feature choices, specifically, need to be expanded or narrowed down based on a set of given criteria and restrictions.

The use of the customization scale has been introduced as an overall indicator for the degree of customization for a particular product. The methodology is not expected to provide an exact solution for the optimum level of customization. However, it should put investors or management on the right track as far as the extent of customization, regarding each component/feature of the product, is concerned. The proposed methodology is a seed to a model that can be further expanded to provide more accurate and practical results. The formulations associated with each goal still needs to be further developed.

The approach of mass customization has also large potential in the field of services, especially in tourism. The reduction of interest for solid arrangements with fixed and predefined content is noticeable, and the public wants more freedom in the choice of arrangements, which allows users to adapt and correlate their needs and wants with the offer and the possibilities of the destination to which they are traveling to. This change of tourism business towards more specialized, flexible network configurations and further consumer integration demonstrates that this industry poses hard challenges, which offer interesting research opportunities.

8. REFERENCES

Abramovici, M.; Ghoffrani, M.; Neubach, M. & Bertram, S. (2007). KOVIP--Product configuration Software and Services for Virtual Products, GITO Verlag, Berlin.

Anisic, Z.; Duvnjak, S. & Mitrovic, T. (2008). Concept of Customized Tourist Offer of Vojvodina Region, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization in Central Europa, pp. 1-5, Palic, Serbia.

Herd, K.; Bardill, A. & Karamanoglu, M. (2007). Designing for co-design: using the product envelope model as a framework for reflection, World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization, Cambrige, USA.

Johannesson, H. & Gedell, S. (2007). Knowledge--Based Configurable Product Platform Models, World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization, Cambrige, USA.

Jordan, P. (2000). Designing Pleasurable Products. An Introduction to the New Human Factors, Taylor & Francis, London.

Spahi, S. & Hosni, Y. (2007). Optimum level of ustomization for Mass Customization Systems, World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization, Cambrige, USA.