Coordination of Product and Process Variety in Mass Customization with Data Mining Approach

Mass customization results in proliferation of products and the corresponding routings. It thus necessitates a coordination issue regarding product and process variety. In addition to coping with product and process variety individually, the linchpin of variety coordination lies in the mapping relationships between the product and process domains. Due to the unstructured nature inherent in product and process variety mapping, it is difficult to coordinate product differentiation and process variation while leveraging product families upon consistent process platforms. Taking advantage of knowledge discovery from historical data, this paper proposes a systematic data mining approach to coordinating product and process variety. In the approach, product and process variety are handled in their individual domains by clustering products and routings into families. The mapping relationships in between are addressed through association rule mining. The potential of the proposed approach is illustrated through a case study of vibration motor mass customization. The performance of the data mining approach is evaluated based on sensitivity analysis.