Integrate Customer Order Decoupling Point and Mass Customisation Concepts: A Literature Review

Abstract

The postponement represents the key strategy for companies to achieve mass customisation. It is associated with the customer order decoupling point (CODP) positioning: the backward shifting, from a pure standardised configuration (i.e. make-to-stock (MTS)), allows companies to delay some supply chain activities until the customer order arrives, increasing product variety while maintaining efficiency. This concept has been widely analysed in the literature, but there is a lack of studies about the means to reach more standardisation starting from a pure customised configuration (i.e. engineer-to-order (ETO)). Nevertheless, the movement toward mass customisation benefits also ETO companies, by reducing costs and lead times while assuring flexibility, and represents a need in the high-competitive global markets. Therefore, this concept needs to be extended to a wider perspective that includes possible levels of customisation achievable from different configurations. This is possible through a good understanding of the CODP theory. This paper reviews the CODP literature to investigate the different existing perspectives and classify them in a structured framework. This framework compares the CODP literature with the mass customisation one, to understand what are the interconnections among them in the actual state of the art and what is missing to achieve a more general view of these concepts. This allows the study to open further research highlighting the recent trends and the uncovered topics.