Abstract
Mass customisation is a business strategy that aims to deliver a variety of products that fulfil customer requirements and, at the same time, keep price and delivery time within acceptable limits. It has been adopted in different sectors to increase value generation, including house building. A major challenge in mass customisation is customer integration, i.e., how to improve value generation by understanding and considering requirements from different customers, and defining their involvement in product development. Most studies on this topic tend to be technology-focused, often being limited to methods and digital tools to generate and display product alternatives. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework of decision categories for customer integration and for devising the scope of customisation to support the definition of mass customisation (MC) strategies. Design science research was the methodological approach adopted in this investigation. It was based on a literature review about mass customisation practices and also on an empirical study developed in a residential building company from Brazil. The main contribution of this paper is a framework for customer integration, which contains a set of decision categories related to the definition of the scope of customisation and customer integration, and a list of practices that are applicable to house building. A secondary contribution of this investigation is a set of constructs that have been used to describe the decision categories and their relationships.
Highlights
In the current scenario of the house building industry, there is a fierce market competition in different countries, primarily concerned with costs, demanding strategies to increase productivity [1,2] and, at the same time, to consider customers heterogeneous demands [3]
This research study aims to answer the question: How can customer integration in the new product development (NPD) of mass-customised house building projects be managed? The main outcome of this investigation is a framework of decision categories for customer integration and for devising the scope of customisation to support the definition of Mass customisation (MC) strategies
Some of the practices provide support to decision making regarding the definition of strategies, while some other practices support the operationalisation of the strategic decisions undertaken
Summary
In the current scenario of the house building industry, there is a fierce market competition in different countries, primarily concerned with costs, demanding strategies to increase productivity [1,2] and, at the same time, to consider customers heterogeneous demands [3]. The progressively increasing diversity of customer requirements has created business opportunities related to product customisation in several different sectors [7,8], including house building [9]. In the house building industry, besides contributing to competitive advantage, the adoption of MC can provide benefits related to environmental and social sustainability, by avoiding waste caused by product changes made after occupancy by users, as well as by increasing their perceived value and sense of ownership [5,18]
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