Companies throughut the world are considering adopting mass customization, or customizing goods or services for individual customers in high volumes, as a strategy that will give them a competitive advantage in themarketplace. However, a primary factor that has slowed the adoption of mass customization as a strategy of choice is the inability to reconcile the dilemma of producing small lot sizes at low cost. In this paper, the authors discuss a system that de-couples costly steps in the production process, thereby allowing companies with high tech/high complexity products to trade-off the costs inherent in automation and technology against the costs of producing small customized lot sizes.
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