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Mass Customization vs Lean


Trends in technology has enabled companies to take customized or diverse orders from customers. Internet has also created many opportunities for companies to make mass customization easier. In the HBR article by Pine and Boynton, they explains how continuous improvement and mass customization are different. They also point out that continuous improvement should be should be a pre-requisite for mass customization. Toyota failed to differentiate mass customization and continuous improvement. They found out hard way that these two concepts are different in terms organizational structures, training, management and customer relations. In my opinion, mass customization in one way reduces waste expenditures and creates value for customers by giving them what they want. On the other hand, there are challenges such as finding right workforce with vast amount of creativity, flexibility, breaking cross functional teams, long response times etc that are all required to make mass customization work. Mass customization has more benefits that outweigh cons. Meeting customer demands is more likely to be effective. Mass customization needs close communication between the firm and its customers compared to traditional production.

I am not sure if a complete or true mass customization is possible where customer has total freedom.  Modularity or setting the right amount of customization options will be the key for mass customization success. Pine talks about 4 process modules, one of which is being “cost less”. Apart from initial investment, the system should add very little cost later on while making the product for mass customization to work. Probably to gain some control on costs, companies offer modularity. For example, we know that Dell eliminated mediators in its supply chain. It interacts directly with its customers via their website. They give customers the option to choose from only from a set of options such as different memory sizes, processor speeds, hard disk sizes etc. This also removes/reduces certain steps in supply chain such as wholesalers and other middlemen thus making the operations more cost-effective. 

One should analyze if mass customization works for their business or not. The nature of the product also impacts the degree of mass customization. Some products may not be suitable mass customization. As mentioned in our Operations & Supply Chain class by Dr. Agarwal, public utilities have to be homogeneous and customization is not an option due to regulations and other risks involved.

Continuous improvement on the other hand can only be done on known or established processes so that wastes can be eliminated. My internship project requires me to coordinate various admin tasks for a continuous improvement program. From what I see, the employees that initiate the lean projects are motivated by their managers that encourage them to participate in lean training. After training the employees learn draw flow charts of their work processes and determine which processes add value and remove the non-value adding steps. To do so, they need to have full understanding of the processes and how the function affects others as well. 

At the end of the day, manufactures/companies love low operational costs and short lead times. This is possible with lean but, is a challenge in mass customization. In my mind I have questions such as, can continuous improvement be done at in mass customization that offer modularity? When modularity is offered, the operations become sort of predictable. I can’t think of how agile the entire supply chain management should be to achieve low cost, high quality, individually customized product that customer wants especially in an ever-changing market. 

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