Abstract
An important role in product variety management is finding an accurate variety extent to which the product matches the consumer’s expectations. In principle, customers prefer to have more rather than less versions of a product from which to choose. This motivates producers to offer a richer variety of goods. As a consequence, it brings a large amount of manufacturing complexity, and configuration conflicts may frequently occur. In order to avoid a situation in which a customer will select mutually incompatible components, product configurators usually recommend corrective actions for generating valid configurations. Nevertheless, the presence of infeasible configurations in customer options are negatively perceived by customers, and therefore it has an unfavorable impact on the sustainability of mass customization. One way to solve this problem is to eliminate, or at least reduce, mutually incompatible components. When considering the fact that eliminating all incompatible components may cause a rapid decrease in product variety, then the reduction of incompatible components can help to solve the product configuration problem. The proposed method aims to find a trade-off solution between minimizing configuration conflicts and maintaining a sufficient level of mass customization. Moreover, two supplementary methods for the determination of infeasible product configurations are proposed in this paper. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methods are demonstrated by two practical examples.
Highlights
A great challenge facing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) today is learning about which mass customization strategy is appropriate for specific product categories and markets, which large product variety should be offered, and how to manage product variety and its resulting complexity
Coming back to the results obtained by generating the alternative product platforms D1–D3, it is evident that D3 is has the smallest value of negative complexity
It is worth noting that sustainable mass customization projects are oriented on the building of trust with customers
Summary
A great challenge facing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) today is learning about which mass customization strategy is appropriate for specific product categories and markets, which large product variety should be offered, and how to manage product variety and its resulting complexity. The main scope of this paper is to outline the necessary steps that are needed to solve this problem by changing the balance between infeasible product configurations and feasible product configurations. For this purpose, two methods for the determination of viable product configurations are proposed in order to find trade-off solution between minimizing configuration conflicts and maintaining a sufficient level of mass customization. Two methods for the determination of viable product configurations are proposed in order to find trade-off solution between minimizing configuration conflicts and maintaining a sufficient level of mass customization These methods will be described and their feasibility will be demonstrated by two realistic examples. A discussion and conclusion with a summary drawn from current and future research relating to product configuration conflicts and sustainability of mass customization is presented
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