Mass customization in the product life cycle

This study presents an introduction to mass customization in the product life cycle—the goal of mass customization, mass customization configurations, and new customer integration techniques, modular design techniques, flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), and supply chain management methods. The study reviews three selected books and twenty-one selected papers—early papers that describe the goal of mass customization, early papers that describe mass customization configurations, and recent papers that describe new customer integration techniques, modular design techniques, FMSs, and supply chain management methods. The study shows that the goal of mass customization is to create individually customized products, with mass production volume, cost, and efficiency, that most companies use ‘assemble-to-order’ configurations to create standardized products, and that more work is needed on interactive customer integration techniques, collaborative modular design techniques, reconfigurable manufacturing systems, and integrated supply chain management methods to achieve the goal of mass customization. S. Smith (B) · G. C. Smith Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Taiwan University, No.1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC e-mail: [email protected] R. Jiao School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA C.-H. Chu Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, ROC