Development of mass customization implementation guidelines for small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

Abstract Mass customization (MC), an organization’s ability to provide customized products and services that fulfil each customer’s idiosyncratic needs without considerable trade-offs in cost, delivery and quality, is gaining importance among companies. To help practitioners on the complex path towards MC, academic research has provided some guidelines for MC implementation. Recent reviews in this research sub-stream underlined the lack of MC implementation guidelines (MC-IGs) specifically developed for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and also indicated the opportunity to use the design science research (DSR) strategy to develop new MC-IGs. The present research answers call for new MC-IGs by developing maturity grid-based MC implementation guidelines for SMEs that comply with the MC-IG building blocks and the MC-IG properties indicated by Suzić, Forza, et al.. The development of such guidelines followed a DSR strategy that included short- and long-term observational evaluations in two SMEs over three years.