Mass Customization And Customer Centricity

Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most industries. Mass customization and personalization are key strategies to meet this challenge. Companies like Procter&Gamble, Lego, Nike, Adidas, Land's End, BMW, or Levi Strauss, among others, have started large-scale mass customization programs. This book provides insight into the different aspects of building a customer centric enterprise. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners share their findings, concepts, and strategies from the perspective of design, production engineering, logistics, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.

This book honors the contributions and career of Cipriano Forza, Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of Academic Journal Guide (ABS), an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, where he curated a special issue on “Coordinating Product Design, Process Design, and Supply Chain Design Decisions”. As one of the world’s foremost researchers in the area of mass customization and operations management, Prof. Forza published more than 200 scientific articles with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. For his groundbreaking work, he received several awards, including the Dr. Theo Williamson Award for Excellence (1997), best paper awards by Production Planning and Control (2005) and the Journal of Operations Management (2006), the Harry Boer Highly Commended Award (2016), and the EurOMA Fellowship Awards (2021). Leading researchers and practitioners that have been working with the honoree contributed a broad range of findings from conceptual and empirical research about mass customization and personalization to this book. The individual chapters take a customer centric view on the challenges and opportunities of product and service customization from an operations management, information technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and organizational perspective. The authors explore key ideas, current developments as well as future research directions.

Over the last decade, mass customization has emerged as an effective approach to customer centricity, i.e. to regard customers as individuals, to proactively develop products and services according to the individual customer's preferences, and to efficiently produce and distribute these offerings. In other words, the goal of mass customization is to efficiently provide customers what they want, when they want it. This paper discusses the background of mass customization and its underlying fundamental capabilities: solution space definition, the design of robust processes, and choice navigation.

Stefan R. Thallmaier’s investigation enables mass customization businesses to better understand how co-design increases customers’ value perception. He focuses on the increasing proliferation of service channels (online, mobile and in-store) and digital media (toolkits, social media and live help) at the co-design interface. Based on qualitative and quantitative research, the author examines how this proliferation impacts customers’ value perception in the different stages of the co-design process. The research shows that customers’ value perception profits from varying levels of social presence throughout the co-design process. The work helps researchers and practitioners with surprising insights as well as hands-on recommendations to improve and adapt interfaces for customer co-design.

A growing heterogeneity of demand, the advent of ';long tail markets';, exploding product complexities, and the rise of creative consumers are challenging companies in all industries to find new strategies to address these trends. Mass customization (MC) has emerged in the last decade as the premier strategy for companies in all branches of industry to profit from heterogeneity of demand and a broad scope of other customer demands.The research and practical experience collected in this book presents the latest thinking on how to make mass customization work. More than 50 authors from academia and management debate on what is viable now, what did not work in the past, and what lurks just below the radar in mass customization, personalization, and related fields.Edited by two leading authorities in the field of mass customization, both volumes of the book discuss, among many other themes, the latest research and insights on customization strategies, product design for mass customization, virtual models, co-design toolkits, customization value measurement, open source architecture, customization communities, and MC supply chains. Through a number of detailed case studies, prominent examples of mass customization are explained and evaluated in larger context and perspective.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Trade and Distribution, grade: 1,3, Leipzig Graduate School of Management, language: English, abstract: Today’s business environment is changing rapidly, with product variety increasing and the customization of products growing. Companies have to react to these developments by adopting strategies which allow a closer reaction to customers’ individual needs as well as an increasing operational efficiency in internal processes. Mass customization is a concept that meets this challenge with offering customized goods at nearly mass production efficiency. However, recently the phrase of ‘mass customization’ has been the subject of much hype and became a buzzword. In 2005, the management consulting company Bain & Company has investigated that mass customization is already one of the 25 most popular management tools. Thus it seems obvious that within the last years the number of companies introducing own mass customization projects has been significantly increasing.6 Especially in the sport shoes industry the term produces a lively interest and can be seen as a trend: Nike, Adidas and Reebok are running a mass customization initiative today. Also Puma, as the fourth major brand in global sportswear market, recently introduced its ‘Mongolian Shoe BBQ’ called project, enabling customers to design their own shoes in the internet and selected retail stores. By having a deeper look at all these companies it becomes evident, that mass customization is frequently implemented ineffectual and rarely part of a strategic plan. Instead, the technique is often only used as a marketing gimmick, “neglecting the needs and possibilities of dealing with single customer orders.” The fact conversely, that mass customization offers much more potential than its utilization as a marketing instrument, is not only proven by theoretical literature. Also several successful practical examples – sometimes from entirely different industries – demonstrate the wide range of opportunities for pursuing a mass customization strategy.

Customer-driven manufacturing is the key concept for the factory of the future. The markets for consumer goods are nowadays marked by an increase in variety, while at the same time showing steadily decreasing product life-cycles. In addition, tailoring the product to the customer's needs is becoming increasingly important in quality improvement. These trends are resulting in production in small batches, driven by customer orders. Customer-driven Manufacturing adopts a design-oriented approach, splitting the realisation of customer-driven manufacturing into three main steps. Firstly, you must understand the primary process of your business. The second step is to analyse and re-design the management and control of the organisation. Finally, the organisation's information system must be analysed and redesigned.

What does it mean "to dell?" This newly coined business verb means to mass-customize, making products only in response to actual demand. This allows a product to "go direct" to a customer, and it's what Dell Computer does instead of forcing mass-produced computers on its customers. And Dell's not alone. As Editors Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine point out in their introduction to Markets of One, mass customization is a trend that has caught on among consumer and business-to-business companies alike - think of Levi's jeans, Aramark's hospital services, Select Comfort mattresses, and Peapod or Streamline grocery delivery, to name a few. Companies customize their offerings to meet the unique needs of individual customers so that nearly everyone can obtain exactly what they want at a reasonable price. It's a paradigm shift away from the one-size-fits-all way managers have thought about markets over the past century- today, every individual customer is a market of one. This collection of ten Harvard Business Review articles chronicles the evolution of business competition from mass markets to markets of one-in other words, from creating standardized value through mass production to creating customer-unique value through mass customization. The book examines many of the resulting changes in approach to strategy and operations-for example, moving from pushing products to fulfilling individual needs, from focusing solely on market share to measuring customer share, and from marketing to the masses to cultivating learning relationships with each customer. Markets of One offers the best of the leading thinkers on the topic, exploring both the promise and pitfalls of mass customization. Practical applications are presented with examples of leading companies who successfully mass customize for markets of one. A Harvard Business Review Book

Challenged by the recent economic crisis, the building and construction industry is currently seeking new orientation and strategies. Here mass customisation is uncovered as a key strategy in helping to meet this challenge. The term mass customisation denotes an offering that meets the demands of each individual customer, whilst still being produced with mass production efficiency. Today mass customisation is emerging from a pilot stage into a scalable and sustainable strategy... The first dedicated publication of its kind, this book provides a forum for the concept within an applied and highly innovative context. The book includes contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers and practitioners in the field from across the world, including Kasper S. Vibaek, Steve Kendall, Martin Bechthold, Mitchell M. Tseng, and Masa Noguchi. Bringing together this panel of experts who have carried out research both in academia and practice, this book provides an overview of state-of-the-art practice related to the concept of customisation and personalisation within the built environment.

Not all customers are created equal. Despite what the tired old adage says, the customer is not always right. Not all customers deserve your best efforts: in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers...and then there is pretty much everybody else. Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization in order to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.