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Mass customization makes use of flexible computer-aided systems to produce customproducts. Such systems combine the low unit costs ofmass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization.
Mass customization is the new frontier in business for both manufacturing andservice industries. At its core, is a tremendous increase in variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs. At its limit, it is the mass production of individually customized goods and services. At its best, it provides strategic advantage and economic value.[1]
Mass customization is aproduct design strategy and is currently used with bothdelayed differentiation andmodular design to enhance thevalue delivered tocustomers.[2]
Mass customization is the method of, "effectivelypostponing the task of differentiating a product for a specific customer until the latest possible point in the supply network".[3]
From a collaborative engineering perspective, mass customization can be viewed as collaborative efforts between customers and manufacturers, who have different sets of priorities and need to jointly search for solutions that best match customers' individual specific needs with manufacturers' customization capabilities.[4]
The concept of mass customization is attributed to Stan Davis inFuture Perfect,[5][6] and was defined byTseng & Jiao (2001, p. 685) as "producing goods and services to meet individual customers' needs with near mass production efficiency".Kaplan & Haenlein (2006) concurred, calling it "a strategy that creates value by some form of company-customer interaction at the fabrication and assembly stage of the operations level to create customized products with production cost and monetary price similar to those of mass-produced products". Similarly,McCarthy (2004, p. 348) highlights that mass customization involves balancing operational drivers by defining it as, "the capability to manufacture a relatively high volume of product options for a relatively large market (or collection of niche markets) that demands customization, without tradeoffs in cost, delivery and quality".
Many implementations of mass customization are operational today, such assoftware-based product configurators that 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, however, has only seen limited adoption. If an enterprise's marketing department offers individual products (atomic market fragmentation), it doesn't often mean that a product is produced individually, but rather that similar variants of the samemass-produced item are available. Additionally, in a fashion context, existing technologies to predict clothing size from user input data have been shown to be not yet of high enough suitability for mass customization purposes.[7]
Companies that have succeeded with mass-customization business models tend to supply purely electronic products.[8] However, these are not true "mass customizers" in the original sense, since they do not offer an alternative to mass production of material goods.
Pine (1993) described four types of mass customization:
He suggested a business model, "the 8.5-figure-path", a process going frominvention to mass production tocontinuous improvement to mass customization and back to invention.
Kamis, Koufaris and Stern (2008) conducted experiments to test the impacts of mass customization when postponed to the stage of retail, online shopping. They found that users perceive greater usefulness and enjoyment with a mass customization interface vs. a more typical shopping interface, particularly in a task of moderate complexity.[10]
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