As demand for personalized products grows, many manufacturers face increasing pressure to provide customizable product offerings. Customized products and mass manufacturing are not necessarily contradictory, as “mass customization” allows fabricators to meet the demand for custom goods. Here we look at how mass customization is changing the way manufacturers make products and why customers buy them.

Manufacturing has been getting smaller, more efficient and more flexible in response to changing customer needs, but for companies that rely heavily on traditional production models, offering customizable products may not seem feasible, never mind profitable.

In cases like these, “mass customization,” which uses an adaptable, demand-oriented strategy to provide a range of custom options, may be the solution to remaining competitive in manufacturing.

“The old paradigm of mass production is no longer suitable for today’s turbulent markets, growing product variety and opportunities for e-commerce,” manufacturing consultant David Anderson writes at Design for Manufacturability. “What is needed now is mass customization, which proactively manages product variety in the environment of rapidly evolving markets and products, many niche markets and individually customized products sold through stores or over the internet.”

At one end of the mass customization spectrum, companies may manufacture goods based on individual customer requirements, tailoring each product for a single purchase. To reach a broader client base, other companies provide variations on existing goods within a niche market, such as offering a range of preset features to choose from within an existing product line.

Alternatively, some firms provide a very large variety of standard products available at all times. These are different from mass production manufacturers that stock a large variety of goods because they incorporate technologies that allow for more flexible manufacturing processes in lieu of high inventories.

“The mass producer has the dilemma of trying to keep large enough inventories to sell a wide variety of products from stock or alternatively using the slow, reactive process of ordering parts and building products in very small batches after receipt of orders,” Anderson adds. “The mass customizer can use flow manufacturing and CNC programmable machine tools to quickly and efficiently make different products in a ‘batch size of one’ — either customized products or any standard product from a large catalog.”

Efficiency is a key standard in mass customization strategies. Although introducing a level of customizability into any product usually raises costs, made-to-order goods often cut down on waste by basing production costs upon actual demand. In addition, design and tooling costs have significantly decreased in recent years, making it more practical to produce smaller product batches or prototypes.

“We still have some way to go before products cost as little to prototype as they do to manufacture in quantity, but today ‘quantity’ may mean 10 or 100 units, not tens of thousands,” Free Software Magazine explains. “Whereas once, there were enormous entry barriers to creating any new product, today the only real barrier is how much time and effort you want to spend on creating a custom design. The actual cost of tooling for manufacturing is becoming — if not quite negligible — at least very affordable.”

Flexibility in manufacturing processes and open communication with customers are two of the main components in effective mass customization.

“The manufacturers that have the most success with this are those whose products are made from components that can be assembled in numerous combinations,” the Wall Street Journal notes. “It requires a system that allows consumers to understand and communicate their unique needs, and it relies on flexible manufacturing to keep costs low and build-times short.”

In fact, maintaining close contact with customers to gauge their needs and receive feedback about a customized product is crucial in the mass customization process, and can also assist with innovation and new product development. This aspect of customization is known as “customer co-design.”

“Customer co-design in a mass customization context establishes an interaction between the manufacturer and customer which offers also possibilities for building up a lasting relationship,” according to a study from Germany’s RWTH Aachen University. “Once the customer has successfully purchased an individual item, the knowledge acquired by the manufacturer represents a considerable barrier against switching suppliers.”

In addition to building stronger loyalty from the consumer base and providing feedback on the types of products or features most in demand, the greater sense of interactive experience in product design can help boost sales, especially with younger clients accustomed to having multiple options to choose from.

According to a separate article from the Journal, the recent rise in sales among mass customizing manufacturers “is evidence of what some business-trend experts say is increasing consumer and entrepreneurial interest in customized goods, ranging from specially made toilet paper to one-of-a-kind pet food. The economy may be a factor. While such items may cost more than their mass-produced counterparts, they’re still generally less expensive than luxury goods.”

Generally, the mass customization movement is geared toward smaller businesses that are better able to maintain close contact with customers and have higher potential for adjusting their manufacturing capabilities based on shifting sales trends. However, it may appear to some small business owners that providing too many choices to customers is a costly mistake.

“From a revenue standpoint, offering customers a seemingly infinite number of choices may seem counterintuitive,” Entrepreneur.com explains. “But those in the mass customization trenches say that in some ways, it’s a more efficient way to run a retail business.”

This increase in choices works because a personalized approach to products reduces the amount of material and stock a company has to handle, with costs being pegged closer to actual demand. In other words, instead of having thousands of pre-made goods that need to be sold, a custom manufacturer may have a smaller inventory coupled with production capabilities that can tailor each batch to meet customer specifications.

Instead of purchasing a mass-market product, “you can have your own personal design — or a design that you pick out — manufactured by somebody in your own town, using local materials,” Inc.com explains. “Innovation experts have used a variety of buzzwords to describe this business model — there’s distributed manufacturing, mass customization, and mass individualization — but there’s an easier way to describe the phenomenon: New Stuff.”

Earlier: Mass Customization: A Leading Paradigm In Future Manufacturing

Resources

Mass Customization, the Proactive Management of Variety
by David Anderson
Design for Manufacturability, 2010

The Made-to-Order Revolution: Custom Flexible Manufacturing is Here
by Terry Hancock
Free Software Magazine, Aug. 9, 2010

Products, Products Everywhere
by Barry Berman
The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 2010

Open Innovation with Customers
by Frank Piller and Christoph Ihl
RWTH Aachen University, March 2009

‘Custom’ is Customary
by Sarah Needleman
The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 26, 2010

Turn Design-on-Demand into Profits
by Michelle Goodman
Entrepreneur.com, Sept. 25, 2009

The Future of Manufacturing
by Max Chafkin
Inc.com, Oct. 1, 2009