Overview

Mass customization uses the platform of supply chain management to focus on the individual demand requirements of the customer. Mass customization is a customer-integrated supply chain that does whatever is necessary to develop, produce, market and deliver low-cost customized services and products, as illustrated in Figure 5.1. By managing the value chain better and faster more opportunities are created for learning, so that the better, faster supply chain moves closer each time to giving the customer precisely what they want, or at least sustaining the divide between customer expectations and delivery.

Source: Pine (1993).

Figure 5.1: Culmination of changes in an organization to mass-customize products and services

Mass Production and Mass Customization

The mass production environment is typified by a focus on efficiency through stability and control. Mass production has developed into providing goods that nearly everyone can afford by increasing the efficiencies of developing, producing, marketing and delivery. However, the rate of technological change, increasing customer expectations, shorter product life cycles, the global marketplace and an information explosive environment not only means that competition is tougher but the marketplace has, and is, becoming increasingly more turbulent and fragmented because, as more and more customers demand tailored solutions to their demands, they in effect become a portfolio of niche markets, which is not an environment suited to the mass production system where customers are placed at the end of the value chain.

In the mass-customized system the customer is placed at the beginning and the end of the...