Managing Workstation Capacity Variation through the Design of a Process Parameter Platform

Offering product variety affordably is the crux of mass customization. Unfortunately, this is the foremost difficulty that enterprises face in making the transition to this paradigm. Anderson (1997) addresses the problem of offering affordable variety through the identification of the cost of variety. The cost of variety is the sum of all the costs of attempting to offer customers variety with inflexible products that are produced in inflexible factories and sold through inflexible channels. This cost includes the cost of customizing or configuring products, the cost of excessive variety, the cost of excessive procedures, and the cost of excessive processes and operations, among others. The key to mass customization, therefore, is the development of a product and a production process that minimize the components of this cost. It is neither feasible nor effective to cope with customers’ demands for product variety through a simple increase in inventory, a reaction commonly found in mass production. Manufacturing enterprises are recognizing that product design presents the best control over offering such a variety (Anderson, 1997). The core issue of transitioning to mass customization now becomes how to design a product and its manufacturing process for affordable customization. While previous chapters of this text focus on the design of the product, the focus in this chapter is the design of an aspect of the manufacturing process; specifically, the determination of process parameters for a single workstation. In order to provide some context, a brief overview of current manufacturing philosophies is provided in Section 1.1. In Section 1.2, the focus is narrowed to address the problem of workstation process parameter design in the presence of changing capacity requirements. In Sections 1.3 and 1.4, the authors present the chapter’s focus: a methodology for the design of a process parameter platform.