'Product templates' a method of implementing mass-customisation

摘要

Customers today are demanding more options in product offerings, while still demanding lower costs and shorter time to market. Demanding more product options is a new requirement on companies that are used to mass-production style productdevelopment. Companies, during the industrial revolution, limited their product offerings to reduce costs and shorten time to market. This facilitated mass production. Mass production requires fixed organizational structures, business infrastructures, and technology structures to support the established product lines. Fixed company structures limit a company's ability to offer product variety. Custom-production, on the other hand, as implemented by the artisans before the industrial revolution, providedgreat variability in product offerings but not the business margins in cost and time to market. In response to this new demand for product variability as well as cost and time to market, a new strategy has emerged which is referred to asmass-customization. Mass-customization is a new business concept which proposes greater options in product offerings while maintaining the efficiencies of mass-production. This new concept however, lacks a verifiable prescription for successfulimplementation. The question in most company managers minds is not "what" mass-customization is but "how" to implement it. This paper presents a method for implementing mass-customization which involves two steps; first, dividing a company's currentproduct offerings into mass-customizable product families with their own product development processes, and second, customizing the product development processes into product templates