David J. Gardner

Mass Customization: How Build to Order, Assemble to Order, Configure to Order, Make to Order, and Engineer to Order Manufacturers Increase Profits and Better Satisfy Customers David J. Gardner Revised edition

Manufacturers with highly-configurable products face daunting challenges to create the flexibility, transparency, and customer experience that delights customers without undermining profits. If a company continually experiences the pain of not being able to seamlessly connect the customer to the enterprise and efficiently drive order demand across the enterprise, the business is not set up properly. There is a misalignment between the company's infrastructure and the actual business requirements. This book explains how to bring a company into alignment.

While much has been written about mass customization as a high-level strategy, much less has been offered about implementing mass customization as a business strategy. Manufacturers that thrive in the 21st century will treat customers as "insiders." Under mass customization, a customer is an "insider." The customer can select from an array of choices to purchase products that match their individualized needs.

This book explains mass customization (also known as build to order, assemble to order, configure to order, make to order and engineer to order) from the standpoint of discrete manufacturers and reviews why mass customization must be viewed as an enterprise-wide business strategy, not merely a departmental initiative. Companies with highly-configurable products need to combine the technical superiority of their products with operational excellence. A manufacturer needs to be able to seamlessly connect the customer to the enterprise so the hand-offs from organization to organization are efficient and keep the process moving forward to a timely completion and delivery.

'Mass Customization' is for anyone whose company faces a constant, uphill challenge with respect to quoting, configuring, and producing high-configured products; any company that has made an investment in product configurator software and wants to understand why operational efficiencies and profits haven't improved, and anyone who would like to get a better understanding of what is required to implement mass customization as well as the power mass customization has to transform certain businesses and industries.