Product Configurators

Tools and Strategies for the Personalization of Objects

Fabio Schillaci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351818995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

This book provides a source of inspiration and a manual for designers, entrepreneurs and professionals who are looking into the practical application of product configurators. In this growing profession, there is a need for a book which focuses on the configuration process from a design perspective. The book delves into the practical application of configurators using case studies of selected firms that present their most significant works. It offers the reader tips, suggestions, technical details and critical issues which need to be considered, from experienced actors and pioneers worldwide, which include:

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• Unfold, Belgium

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• In-flexions, France

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• Nervous System, USA

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• Okinlab, Germany

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• SkimLab, France

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• Twikit, Belgium

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• INDG, The Netherlands

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• ZeroLight, United Kingdom

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• 3Dimerce, The Netherlands

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• 3DSource, USA

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• Bagaar, Belgium

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• MyCustomizer, Canada

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• Combeenation, Austria

Part I

The context

CHAPTER 1

Strategic foundations and capabilities of mass customization

Frank T. Piller and Ning Wang

Within the last two decades, mass customization has emerged as a dominant business strategy. The aim of mass customization is to profit from people’s differences by enabling the efficient provision of goods and services that best serve the personal needs of customers.

This chapter introduces the concept, its background, and the fundamental capabilities that companies have to develop when building a mass customization offering. We also speculate about future developments in the field.¹

Introduction: Customization becomes the new standard

In many industries, we can observe today an uninterrupted trend toward heterogeneity of demand.² Explanations may be found in a growing number of single households, a changing demographic structure, an orientation towards design, and a new awareness of quality and functionality that demands durable and reliable products corresponding exactly to the specific needs of the purchaser.³ This trend is reinforced by the entry of Generations Y and Z as consumers in the marketplace, generations characterized by considerable experience in customizing their personal communications and media consumption (curating one’s own Facebook page, personalizing a music stream). It is likely that these young consumers transfer these experiences to other product categories. Customization thus becomes the new standard.

Because of this, manufacturers are forced to create product portfolios with an increasing wealth of variants, right down to the production of units of one. As a final consequence, many companies have to process their customers’ demand individually. Since the early 1990s, mass customization has emerged as one leading idea for achieving precisely this objective. In accordance with Joseph Pine, we define mass customization as “developing, producing, marketing, and delivering affordable goods and services with enough variety and customization that nearly everyone finds exactly what they want.”⁴ In other words, the goal is to provide customers what they want, when they want it. However, to apply this apparently simple statement in practice is quite complex. As a business paradigm, mass customization provides an attractive business proposition to add value by directly addressing customer needs and, in the meantime, utilizing resources efficiently without incurring excessive cost. This is particularly important at a time where competition is no longer based just on price and conformance of dimensional quality.

Today, there are many companies that have employed mass customization successfully. Consider the following examples:

• BMW: Customers can use an online toolkit to design Mini Cooper roofs with their very own graphics or pictures, which are then reproduced with an advanced digital printing system on special foils. The toolkit has enabled BMW to tap into the custom aftersales market, which was previously owned by niche companies. In addition, Mini Cooper customers can also choose from among hundreds of options for many of the car’s components as BMW is able to manufacture all cars on demand according to each buyer’s individual order.⁵

• Selve: This London- and Munich-based manufacturer of women’s custom shoes is a fine example of a company that interacts well with its customers both in the traditional store and online. Selve enables its customers to create their own shoes by selecting from a variety of materials and designs; in addition, it offers a truly custom shoe fit, based on 3D scanning of customers’ feet. Trained consultants provide advice in the company’s stores, and the online shop offers reorders. Shoes are all made to order in a specialized factory in China and are delivered in about two weeks. Customers get this dedicated service for a cost of between 150 euro and 450 euro, not cheap but still affordable for many consumers compared to the price level of a traditional shoemaker (starting in the region of 1,000 euro).

• mymuesli: Food customization is one of the fastest developing industries in the field of mass customization.⁶ German company mymuesli is a pioneer in this market. It offers an internet-based toolkit to customize cereal out of myriad options. Via interaction with the toolkit, customers can combine their preferred options from the components of “Base,” “Fruit,” “Nuts & Seeds” and “Extra Ingredients” into a mixed package. Interestingly, mymuesli also could successfully establish a large assortment of cereals in German supermarkets with its ability to produce efficiently in small batches; by offering special retail editions and large variety, it could conquer the market, utilizing its customization brand promise to win consumers from established mass-market brands.

What do these examples have in common? Regardless of product category or industry, they have all turned customers’ heterogeneous needs into an opportunity to create value rather than regarding heterogeneity as a problem that has to be minimized, challenging the “one size fits all” assumption of traditional mass production. To achieve this objective, mass customization demands a specific set of processes and capabilities for aligning an organization with its customers’ needs. Below, we will introduce three fundamental capabilities which characterize mass customization: The ability of an organization to identify the product or service attributes along which customer needs diverge (“solution space development”), the ability to reuse or recombine existing organizational and value chain resources (“robust process design”), and the ability to help customers identify or build solutions to their own needs (“choice navigation”).⁷

A review of the definition of mass customization

According to Davis, who initially coined the term in 1987, mass customization “means that the same large number of customers can be reached as in mass markets of the industrial economy, and simultaneously they can be treated individually as in the customized markets of preindustrial economies.”⁸ Pine popularized the concept and defined mass customization as “providing tremendous variety and individual customization, at prices comparable to standard goods and services,” enabling the production of products and service “with enough variety and customization that nearly everyone finds exactly what they want.”⁹ A more pragmatic definition was introduced by Tseng and Jiao. According to them, mass customization corresponds to “the technologies and systems to deliver goods and services that meet individual customers’ needs with near mass production efficiency.”¹⁰

Often, as in Pine’s interpretation, this definition is supplemented by the requirement that the individualized goods do not carry the price premiums associated traditionally with (craft) customization.¹¹ However, consumers are frequently found to be willing to pay a price premium for customization that reflects the increment of utility which they gain from a product better fitted to their needs than the best standardized product attainable.¹² Hence, today we opt neither to include a price proposition in the definition of mass customization nor to reduce the concept to “on-demand manufacturing of lot sizes of one.” Custom products can be produced in larger quantities for an individual customer. This frequently happens in industrial markets, for example, when a supplier provides a custom component that is integrated into a vendor’s product. Indeed, one of the biggest lessons from current research is that there is no one best way to mass customize.¹³ Take, for example, the widespread belief that mass customization entails building products to order. This is not necessarily true. As discussed earlier, customers are looking for products that fit their needs, and they do not necessarily care whether those offerings are physically built to their order or whether those items come from a warehouse – just as long as their needs are fulfilled at a reasonable price.¹⁴ Consider the example of Pandora Radio or other music streaming services: Every user of this internet radio station will praise its ability to provide a really individual stream of music, personalized for each user. However, Pandora’s custom music delivery system builds on matching standard songs to a user’s preferences, not on customizing the song itself.

To reap the benefits of mass customization, though, managers must think of it not as a stand-alone business strategy for replacing production and distribution processes, but as a set of organizational capabilities that can enrich their organizations’ existing portfolios of capabilities. Mass customization means profiting from the fact that all people are different; that is, realizing value out of customer heterogeneities rather than conforming to the assumptions of traditional mass production.

Three capabilities of mass customization

The key to profiting from mass customization is to see it as a set of organizational capabilities that can supplement and enrich an existing system. While the nature and characteristics of these additional capabilities are clearly dependent on industry context or product characteristics, there are three fundamental groups of capabilities that determine the ability of a firm to mass customize (Figure 1.1). Companies that successfully master the proposition of mass customization have built competencies around these three core capabilities. In an earlier paper, my coauthors and I have called them “solution space development,” “robust process design,” and “choice navigation” (the derivation of these capabilities builds on work by Salvador et al., 2009¹⁵). I will introduce these capabilities briefly in the following and discuss them in more detail in the remaining sections.

Figure 1.1
Overview of the three strategic capabilities for mass customization

• Solution space development: First and foremost, a company seeking to adopt mass customization has to be able to understand what the idiosyncratic needs of its customers are. This is in contrast to the approach of a mass producer, where the company focuses on identifying “central tendencies” among its customers’ needs and targets them with a limited number of standard products. Conversely, a mass customizer has to identify the product attributes along which customer needs diverge the most. Once this is understood, the firm knows what is required to accurately meet the needs of its customers. Consequently, it can draw up the so-called solution space, clearly defining what it is going to offer and what it is not.

• Robust process design:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I The context
• Part II The gallery: From conceptual to commercial applications
• Part III Behind the scenes
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index