Section 14 Mass Customisation Concept

In Mass Customisation, each order is produced using Customised Technology.The company has the ability to quickly and cheaply customise production technology to an individual order.

Traditionally this has not been the case. The company’s technology is fixed by product line and changes are heavily constrained by time, cost, customer patience etc. So if an important customer for a Low Cost Product desires a significantly higher quality, it can only be achieved at a large increase in cost (see figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1: Low Cost Strategy. To produce a higher variety of product features the business moves along the performance curve. This results in much higher costs.

In Mass Customisation, the idea is to fulfil the same order without a large change in cost (see figure 14.2).

Figure 14.2: To produce a higher variety of product features a customised technology is deployed. The business moves to a new performance curve. This costs do not increase significantly.