Mass Customization examines the business opportunities, considerations, and challenges manufacturers in various industries must weigh before committing to the significant investment in machinery and software needed to go to mass customization. For manufacturers who decide that it’s time to take the plunge, the author describes the proven methods and latest technologies for making mass customization work seamlessly and profitably on the factory floor. Mass customization—the automated manufacturing bespoke products, profitably combining the low unit costs of mass production with the flexibility of building custom products to order—has been touted as the next big thing for more than a quarter of a century. Until recently, however, mass customization made only modest inroads in a few industries. Now, the convergence of new ICT and manufacturing technologies with traditional CNC technologies means that mass customization’s moment has arrived for breaking out into a wide range of industries. Hans Kull is an engineer and mathematician who applies his expertise in combinatorial optimization, programming, and engineering to devising end-to-end automated solutions for mass customization, automating and optimizing all processes—from bespoke parts supply, order processing, production, and waste minimization to packing and delivery. He shares with his readers practical lessons for making mass customization succeed, case studies from various industries, and an insider’s vision of the business implications of mass customization’s coming of age.

Mass Customization: A Supply Chain Approach is a text on the emerging topic of mass customization in manufacturing. The contributed chapters in this book provide a unified treatment to the topic by offering coverage in four main categories - concepts and current state of research; problem solving frameworks, models, and methodologies; supportive techniques and technologies for enabling mass customization; and future research agenda. The book blends theory and practice and includes prototypical applications to illustrate this complex, yet emerging field of inquiry.

This book defines the parameters of the emerging business strategy of mass customization, covering the main categories in a systematic examination of: manufacturing systems and mass customization; supply chain management and mass customization; and information systems and mass customization. The book provides a conceptual framework for mass customization, its tools, its solutions, and real-world examples of successful implementations of the business strategy.

Gardner explains how to bring a company into alignment with mass customization (also known as build to order, assemble to order, configure to order, make to order, and engineer to order). He also reviews why mass customization must be viewed as an enterprise-wide business strategy, not merely a departmental initiative.

"This book describes original, innovative works on IT systems for mass customization, and provides a multitude of solutions, tools, concepts and successful realizations of IT systems for mass customization. It discusses state-of-the-art mass customization while depicting the importance of IT in making the strategy function efficiently in order to support the business processes required for manufacturing individualized products"--Provided by publisher.

A growing heterogeneity of demand, the advent of ';long tail markets';, exploding product complexities, and the rise of creative consumers are challenging companies in all industries to find new strategies to address these trends. Mass customization (MC) has emerged in the last decade as the premier strategy for companies in all branches of industry to profit from heterogeneity of demand and a broad scope of other customer demands.The research and practical experience collected in this book presents the latest thinking on how to make mass customization work. More than 50 authors from academia and management debate on what is viable now, what did not work in the past, and what lurks just below the radar in mass customization, personalization, and related fields.Edited by two leading authorities in the field of mass customization, both volumes of the book discuss, among many other themes, the latest research and insights on customization strategies, product design for mass customization, virtual models, co-design toolkits, customization value measurement, open source architecture, customization communities, and MC supply chains. Through a number of detailed case studies, prominent examples of mass customization are explained and evaluated in larger context and perspective.

What does it mean "to dell?" This newly coined business verb means to mass-customize, making products only in response to actual demand. This allows a product to "go direct" to a customer, and it's what Dell Computer does instead of forcing mass-produced computers on its customers. And Dell's not alone. As Editors Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine point out in their introduction to Markets of One, mass customization is a trend that has caught on among consumer and business-to-business companies alike - think of Levi's jeans, Aramark's hospital services, Select Comfort mattresses, and Peapod or Streamline grocery delivery, to name a few. Companies customize their offerings to meet the unique needs of individual customers so that nearly everyone can obtain exactly what they want at a reasonable price. It's a paradigm shift away from the one-size-fits-all way managers have thought about markets over the past century- today, every individual customer is a market of one. This collection of ten Harvard Business Review articles chronicles the evolution of business competition from mass markets to markets of one-in other words, from creating standardized value through mass production to creating customer-unique value through mass customization. The book examines many of the resulting changes in approach to strategy and operations-for example, moving from pushing products to fulfilling individual needs, from focusing solely on market share to measuring customer share, and from marketing to the masses to cultivating learning relationships with each customer. Markets of One offers the best of the leading thinkers on the topic, exploring both the promise and pitfalls of mass customization. Practical applications are presented with examples of leading companies who successfully mass customize for markets of one. A Harvard Business Review Book

The Digital Bespoke? is about mass customization, 3D printing, human bodies, and the step towards digitally built objects made to individual specifications. The author argues that the modes of customization offered by digital fabrication and mass production have more in common with their industrial predecessors than with craft-based customization. Using case studies of historical and current practices from Europe, Africa, and North America to ground her theory, she investigates where digital fabrication technologies have developed from and how their uses differ from existing modes of production. Digital fabrication and mass customization are concepts encompassing broad ecosystems of technologies and practices. Both are increasingly implemented and hyped. As such, it is imperative to address not just their potential, but their challenges. Written for a scholarly audience and for design practitioners concerned with the social and political impacts of digital fabrication and mass customization, this book will be a useful reference point for students and researchers in digital and analogue design, technology, and material culture.

A starter to the concepts of modularization and mass customization. Condensed and application-oriented approach for a broad audience in engineering, production, sales and marketing. Provides an extensive configurator evaluation checklist for future users and a supplement of business cases.

Parametric design and digital fabrication are enabling non-designers to mass produce non-standard, highly differentiated products – from shoes and tableware to furniture and even houses. The result of these newly available mass customization tools has been a ‘democratization’ of design. Mass Customization and Design Democratization is the first book to address this recent phenomenon. Demonstrating how the considerable potential of these tools can be realized in practice, it introduces essential technologies and design approaches and provides numerous examples of the latest, cutting edge work from leading design firms, manufacturers and thinkers. The book examines what mass customization means for architecture and the building industry and investigates its impact on the sector’s most commoditized enterprise – suburban housing. Asking whether design democratization is viable in the current context and exploring what kind of mass customization is possible, useful, and desirable, it poses fundamental questions about the authorship of design and the functional and aesthetic quality of products designed by non-designers. A highly designed book featuring over 200 color illustrations, this is essential reading for professionals as well as students taking courses in digital architecture, parametric design, and mass customization.