Evaluation and Selection in Product Design for Mass Customization

Abstract

Today’s highly competitive, global marketplace is redefining the way companies do business. Mass customization (Pine, 1993) provides a new paradigm for manufacturing industries, whereby variety and customization supplant standardized products, heterogeneous and fragmented markets spring from once homogeneous markets, and product life cycles and development cycles spiral downward (Tseng and Jiao 1996, 1998). It has recently received much attention and popularity from both industry and academia, and has been considered as a new battlefield for manufacturing enterprises (Wortmann et al. 1997). Mass customization aims at delivering an increasing product variety to satisfy diverse customer needs while maintaining near mass production efficiency (Tseng and Jiao 1996). Essentially, it is an oxymoron of variety to cater for customization and the low costs of variety fulfillment. To adopt the mass customization paradigm, many companies are being faced with the challenge of providing as much variety as possible in the market place with as little variety as possible between products in order to maintain economies of scale, while satisfying a wide range of customer requirements.