Flexibility to Manufacturing Process Reengineering for Mass Customization

It is a trend to implement mass customization (MC) to meet customer demands and win the global competition. With mass customization, products can be produced with low cost, high quality, and in time as mass production. To implement MC, today’s manufacturing process should be reengineered. However, it is believed that manufacturing process reengineering (MPR) is a highly risk job. A manufacturing system for MC should be highly flexible so as to meet customer demands. Flexibility in manufacturing systems has been recognized as one of the vital competitive priorities in manufacturing strategy. Flexibility should be taken into consideration in MPR to reduce the risk. Thus, flexibility analysis can be used as a tool in the MPR for MC. Consider that the existing theory of flexibility does not provide a guide in manufacturing reengineering for MC, this paper develops a measurement of flexibility in manufacturing systems for customization. This measurement measures not only the impact of manufacturing technology hardware but also the impact of the product design and process design, hence, it can be used as guide in manufacturing reengineering for MC. A case study is presented to show the use of the proposed approach.