Product development organizations answer to a new boss these days: the customer. With an ever-expanding variety of product choices from which to choose, customers are now dictating the direction of products in nearly every market more than ever before, rendering the concept of “mass market” in nearly every product category somewhat meaningless.
As a result, manufacturers are scrambling for ways to innovate and produce products that fulfill increasingly finicky customers’ demands as quickly as possible, but without adding additional costs to the process. After all, customers want what they want, but they don’t necessarily want to pay more for it.
So where does this leave manufacturers today who are facing increasingly stiff global competition and tighter-than-ever profit margins? Thanks to advances in manufacturing processes, information technology, communication, and product design, manufacturers can now transition to mass customization to better respond to existing customer demands and serve the needs of smaller niche markets.
Mass customization at its core is as much a business practice as a technology practice and, as such, requires manufacturers to think differently; be more market-driven and customer-responsive. Thanks to the Internet, manufacturers now have a great mechanism through which to communicate with customers—and vice versa—to garner interest in new products or determine which ones aren’t meeting expectations.
By definition, mass customization is the ability to design and manufacture tailored to meet customers’ needs at mass production costs and speed. Sounds great, but challenges abound. In order to deploy mass customization efficiently, organizations must keep costs low to match those of standardized products; achieve high quality and high variety in products; and produce these products quickly in order to respond to rapidly evolving markets.
Several key industry trends, such as modularization of products, design configurability, and more flexible automation in manufacturing processes, provide organizations with the ability to build a large variety of end products at costs comparable to mass-produced products. Let’s take a look at each of these trends to understand their impact in the deployment of mass customization.
Modularity. Developing product families around a modular product architecture greatly enhances an organization’s ability to transition to mass customization. This requires the creation of a product platform, a set of subsystems and interfaces that form a common structure from which a family of related products can be developed and produced efficiently. Standardization and flexibility—achieved through the modularization of products, processes, and the supply chain—all play an important role in mass customization initiatives.
Product configuration software. These play a vital role in facilitating manufacturers’ efforts to transition from mass production to mass customization. Product configurators are software tools that enable customers to order exactly what they need or want based on allowable choices and is typically deployed through the Internet or Extranet. A configurator allows the convergence on a valid configuration within the product line’s capabilities, precisely summarizes the customization, and becomes the source of information transmitted to the order entry system and ultimately to the factory.
Parametric design tools. Parametric modeling technology is another important enabler to mass customization. Parametric modeling tools enable users to create flexible product models that are easily modified geometrically. These engineering changes can be linked to analysis software, such as FEA and CFD, allowing designers explore design variations and perform ‘what if’ iterations to see the effects of slight design variations and determine if failure occurs.
Flexible automation. In the same way that design tools now facilitate more flexibility in product design, virtual factory design software tools are now being used to design more flexible production processes. Also, simulation and analysis tools can be used to optimize these processes. More responsive manufacturing systems can be quickly reconfigured to allow flexibility not only in producing new products but also in changing the system itself. Such systems require the use of sophisticated automation systems that are flexible, extensible and re-usable.
Supply chain management. Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles to deploying mass customization is the lack of flexibility and responsiveness of the supply chain. Simplify the supply chain to reduce the variety of parts and raw materials so materials can be procured spontaneously by automatic and pull-based resupply techniques. Reducing the part and material variety can also help shrink the vendor base, further simplifying the supply chain.
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