Scenario-Based Strategy of Mass Customization in Application to Korean Industrial Cases

Hyun Chan Lee

The goal of mass customization (MC) is providing customers as much variety as possible for their diverse needs with as low cost as possible for product development and production. The key element in enabling MC is the introduction of product platforms as a part of solutions to reduce additional cost and time for customizing. Currently, a number of methods to apply product platform architecture have been developed to implement MC. However they are only considering the manufacturing process of the product life-cycle even though the cost and time for manufacturing process is lesser than a half of those of whole processes. The goal of this paper is to proliferate the strategy in MC to find the most appropriate strategy for a specific company. It is performed by means of applying strategies for product diversification to other sub-processes. Contrary to the strategy simply for efficient manufacturing, we extended application to other sub-processes such as basic design, purchasing raw materials, and packaging for efficient logistics. In this way, companies are able to provide customized products without changing the current manufacturing system. The extension can yield considerable savings in time and cost in spite of diverse products. In this paper, a scenario-based method is proposed to enlarge the strategy on whole product life-cycle in different ways for maximizing the cost and time savings and customer satisfaction simultaneously. The process and benefit of the proposed a scenario-based method are verified by real world cases of a Korean health food company through several scenarios.

Select Volume / Issues:

• Volume 3 Issue 6, Nov. 2012

Year:

2012

Type of Publication:

Article

Keywords:

Mass Customization; Strategy Proliferation; Sub Process; Cost and Time Savings; Scenario Based Strategy

Journal:

IJECCE

Volume:

3

Number:

6

Pages:

1519-1525

Month:

November