Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most industries. Mass customization and personalization are key strategies to meet this challenge. Companies like Procter&Gamble, Lego, Nike, Adidas, Land's End, BMW, or Levi Strauss, among others, have started large-scale mass customization programs. This book provides insight into the different aspects of building a customer centric enterprise. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners share their findings, concepts, and strategies from the perspective of design, production engineering, logistics, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.

This book honors the contributions and career of Cipriano Forza, Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of Academic Journal Guide (ABS), an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, where he curated a special issue on “Coordinating Product Design, Process Design, and Supply Chain Design Decisions”. As one of the world’s foremost researchers in the area of mass customization and operations management, Prof. Forza published more than 200 scientific articles with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. For his groundbreaking work, he received several awards, including the Dr. Theo Williamson Award for Excellence (1997), best paper awards by Production Planning and Control (2005) and the Journal of Operations Management (2006), the Harry Boer Highly Commended Award (2016), and the EurOMA Fellowship Awards (2021). Leading researchers and practitioners that have been working with the honoree contributed a broad range of findings from conceptual and empirical research about mass customization and personalization to this book. The individual chapters take a customer centric view on the challenges and opportunities of product and service customization from an operations management, information technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and organizational perspective. The authors explore key ideas, current developments as well as future research directions.

A growing heterogeneity of demand, the advent of ';long tail markets';, exploding product complexities, and the rise of creative consumers are challenging companies in all industries to find new strategies to address these trends. Mass customization (MC) has emerged in the last decade as the premier strategy for companies in all branches of industry to profit from heterogeneity of demand and a broad scope of other customer demands.The research and practical experience collected in this book presents the latest thinking on how to make mass customization work. More than 50 authors from academia and management debate on what is viable now, what did not work in the past, and what lurks just below the radar in mass customization, personalization, and related fields.Edited by two leading authorities in the field of mass customization, both volumes of the book discuss, among many other themes, the latest research and insights on customization strategies, product design for mass customization, virtual models, co-design toolkits, customization value measurement, open source architecture, customization communities, and MC supply chains. Through a number of detailed case studies, prominent examples of mass customization are explained and evaluated in larger context and perspective.

Customer-driven manufacturing is the key concept for the factory of the future. The markets for consumer goods are nowadays marked by an increase in variety, while at the same time showing steadily decreasing product life-cycles. In addition, tailoring the product to the customer's needs is becoming increasingly important in quality improvement. These trends are resulting in production in small batches, driven by customer orders. Customer-driven Manufacturing adopts a design-oriented approach, splitting the realisation of customer-driven manufacturing into three main steps. Firstly, you must understand the primary process of your business. The second step is to analyse and re-design the management and control of the organisation. Finally, the organisation's information system must be analysed and redesigned.

Not all customers are created equal. Despite what the tired old adage says, the customer is not always right. Not all customers deserve your best efforts: in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers...and then there is pretty much everybody else. Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization in order to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.

This book defines the parameters of the emerging business strategy of mass customization, covering the main categories in a systematic examination of: manufacturing systems and mass customization; supply chain management and mass customization; and information systems and mass customization. The book provides a conceptual framework for mass customization, its tools, its solutions, and real-world examples of successful implementations of the business strategy.

What does it mean "to dell?" This newly coined business verb means to mass-customize, making products only in response to actual demand. This allows a product to "go direct" to a customer, and it's what Dell Computer does instead of forcing mass-produced computers on its customers. And Dell's not alone. As Editors Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine point out in their introduction to Markets of One, mass customization is a trend that has caught on among consumer and business-to-business companies alike - think of Levi's jeans, Aramark's hospital services, Select Comfort mattresses, and Peapod or Streamline grocery delivery, to name a few. Companies customize their offerings to meet the unique needs of individual customers so that nearly everyone can obtain exactly what they want at a reasonable price. It's a paradigm shift away from the one-size-fits-all way managers have thought about markets over the past century- today, every individual customer is a market of one. This collection of ten Harvard Business Review articles chronicles the evolution of business competition from mass markets to markets of one-in other words, from creating standardized value through mass production to creating customer-unique value through mass customization. The book examines many of the resulting changes in approach to strategy and operations-for example, moving from pushing products to fulfilling individual needs, from focusing solely on market share to measuring customer share, and from marketing to the masses to cultivating learning relationships with each customer. Markets of One offers the best of the leading thinkers on the topic, exploring both the promise and pitfalls of mass customization. Practical applications are presented with examples of leading companies who successfully mass customize for markets of one. A Harvard Business Review Book