Mass Customization: A Strategy for Customer-Centric Enterprises - A Review of the Strategic Capabilities to Make Mass Customization Work

Abstract

Over the last decade, mass customization has emerged as an effective approach to customer centricity, i.e. to regard customers as individuals, to proactively develop products and services according to the individual customer’s preferences, and to efficiently produce and distribute these offerings. In other words, the goal of mass customization is to efficiently provide customers what they want, when they want it. This paper discusses the background of mass customization and its underlying fundamental capabilities: solution space definition, the design of robust processes, and choice navigation.