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Vol 31 - No 02 - March 2005 Branch news: London Branch - Operational challenges of Mass Customisation Hook, 8th December 2004 What is mass customisation? What is mass customisation? Most of you will have heard about it; few will know what it really means. On the 8th December Philip Brabazon, Research Fellow at Nottingham University came to our local branch meeting at EEF offices in Hook, Hampshire to tell us all about it. The challenge of satisfying ever changing customer demand is a problem faced by most businesses. Product variety is increasing all the time. Did you realise that in early 1970’s you could buy 12 types of dental floss, but today that has increased to 64. Whilst you could have 5 trainer types in the 1970’s now you can have 285. Whilst demand may have increased, it has not increased at that rate and the natural consequence, which all manufacturers and service providers are well aware of, is that every business has to produce many more products and product variants with lower volumes whilst still responding to ever increasing cost pressures. This has led many businesses to explore mass customisation as a real solution to this operational challenge and as a source of competitive advantage. Effective design, marketing and planning, to allow make-to-order through mass customisation, can reap real rewards. As Philip explained, Mass Customisation has been well defined in the literature. Two popular definitions are: “The production of customised goods and services on a mass basis” (Davis, 1987) “The design of highly featured and customised products at a very low or even zero differential cost over their standard competitors” (Ross 1998). In other words, we are talking about customised products at mass production costs. Philip entertained us with a wide range of business examples, such as orangeboxuk, the office furniture company which offers a huge range of product variants, particularly of office chair options, and manufactures over 50% of its total office chair production in batches of 1 The Merck Medco, centralised prescription dispensing ‘factory’ in the US Adidas custom-fitted, customstyled trainers Selve, ‘The Shoe Customizer’ (try it in Google) The issues of implementing mass customisation are not trivial and Philip introduced the audience to some of the more complex examples. For example, the concept of the Delta Value Curve: I don’t have enough space to describe it here, suffice it to say that it offers an analytical tool to decide where and for which features mass customisation is relevant. This is clearly key for product, service and process design. I particularly liked Philip’s variety impact slide (see picture) which showed an interesting variant on the downward spiral with which most of us are only too familiar. Not surprisingly there are many challenges in implementing mass customisation and Philip described these in some detail. By this time the audience became very involved in the discussion and a lively debate ensued. Philip is clearly a ‘natural’ speaker and presented a complex subject in depth but very lucidly, interestingly and enthusiastically. The audience really enjoyed it; just a pity that a number of members who had put their names down for the evening didn’t show up. Still, it was their loss, not ours… Also particular thanks to EEF South who provided the venue and offered attendees an excellent supper to support the lively networking session after Philip’s stimulating talk. Günther Kruse, FIOM Supply Chain Analytics Related Topics:
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