Mass customization has quickly entered the lexicon of popular business. Many companies are striving to provide customized products and services to their customers at low costs. However, the concept of mass customization represents an apparent paradox for manufacturing by combining customization and mass production, offering unique products in a mass produced, low cost, high volume production environment.
Historically, production lines were designed to manufacture either customized, crafted products or mass produced, standardized products. Customized products are made using low volume processes that cope well with a high variety of products. Similarly, a mass production process is chosen for making standardized products in a high volume, low cost environment. In contrast to this traditional dichotomy, mass customization provides a one-of-a-kind product manufactured on a large scale allowing customers to purchase a customized product near the cost of a mass produced item. The manufacturing systems required to support mass customization has not been adequately discussed in extent research.
This study explores the multi-faceted nature of mass customization by developing a typology of mass customization approaches and the operational parameters required to support each approach. Notions of customer involvement and modularity coupled with modularity types in a conceptual model to provide a basis for identifying mass customizers. The conceptual model suggests a set of configurations of process and infrastructure which work in concert to support the various types of mass customization.
This conceptual model is tested through empirical investigation of 194 companies producing both consumer and industrial products. In addition to developing new scales to capture the concept of mass customization, the survey instrument includes scales relating to the environment, performance, business and operations strategy as well as choices made with respect to process, organization and infrastructure. A numerical taxonomy is developed that validates the conceptual typology and demonstrates the discriminating power of the mass customization scales. In addition, the data is used to test the hypothesized configurations and explore the operational parameters required to support each type of mass customization.