Mass customization is providing customers with highquality, competitively priced goods and SERVICES tailormade to their specifications or needs. Mass customization attempts to deliver the ECONOMIES OF SCALE of mass PRODUCTION along with the special attention associated with custom-made PRODUCTs and services. While marketers emphasize the fact that the customer is king or queen, businesses have often relied on a significant degree of guesswork about their customers. Clearance sales, rebates, and discounts are testimony to the lack of accurate knowledge of customer wants and needs. With the help of the INTERNET and software systems known as “choiceboards,” companies are now allowing customers to design their own products. First popularized by Dell Computer Corporation, choiceboards provide a menu of components, attributes, prices, and delivery options. Choiceboards anticipate consumer questions, offering advice and signaling when customers make questionable selections. Consumer decisions are sent directly to the firm’s manufacturing center for production, reducing ordering time and allowing manufacturers to minimize inventory. Dell Computers maintains less than a week’s worth of inventory at any time, reducing costs and avoiding becoming stuck with out-of-date components. Michael Dell envisions a time when companies will maintain no inventory and only produce on demand what customers order. While mass customization generally requires use of sophisticated technology systems, the concept can be used for many nontechnology-based products. Amazon. com epitomizes customization of book selection, and service industries from banking to communications use mass customization to personalize service offerings. Proctor & Gamble created Reflect.com, allowing consumers to create customized beauty-care products, each labeled with the customer’s name. Customfan allows consumers to design their own licensed apparel with choices of sizes, color, style, and graphics. One of the important considerations in mass customization is organization-wide coordination. Mass-customization systems often require redesign of manufacturing systems. Modular production processes allow companies to quickly assemble products on demand. While Dell Computers has successfully adopted mass customization, automobile manufacturers continue to struggle. In addition to reducing inventory levels, mass customization also provides valuable information about customers and helps build CUSTOMER LOYALTY. Marketers recognize it is almost always easier and less expensive to keep an existing customer than to try to find new customers. Mass customization provides firms with valuable information to use in anticipating their customers’ future needs.
See also INVENTORY CONTROL.