Collaborate With Customers Design for Mass Customization Design for Manufacture Design for Quality & Reliability Implement Fast Time-to-Market Techniques Collaborate with Suppliers in Development

• Design products so that customer orders can be filled quickly and simply
• Use modular design techniques
• Work closely with both internal manufacturing/assembly people and suppliers make/buy decisions for subassemblies and components
• Use configuration software effectively to minimize engineering workload and ensure that every customized product shipped will perform properly

• Design with objectives other than fast order fulfillment of the customer's desires (i.e. objectives like long production runs, lowest cost, fit existing engineering and manufacturing methods, decouple manufacturing from customer demand, build to stock and ship from stock, build to forecast, do what we have always done)

• Results in product designs that allow the sales and manufacturing functions to ship a customized product quickly profitably, often putting the company well ahead of its competition
• Facilitates a company strategy of minor, but fast, product changes to replace some of the huge and lengthy product development projects
• Permits the company to be more responsive to product suggestions by the customer
• Lays the groundwork for major inventory reductions

"And where along the value chain do you want to mass-customize - in design, manufacture, sales, service? Be selective: a good rule of thumb is to mass-customize as much as necessary and as little as possible." - Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization, Gilmore and Pine

"At the heart of their (computer companies) remarkable advance is modularity-building a complex product or process from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole. Through the widespread adoption of modular designs, the computer industry has dramatically increased its rate of innovation. Indeed, it is modularity, more than speedy processing and communication or any other technology, that is responsible for the heightened pace of change that managers in the computer industry now face. And strategies based on modularity are the best way to deal with that change." - Managing in an Age of Modularity, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, Harvard Business Review, Sept-Oct 1997

"Mass customization calls for a customer-center orientation in production and delivery processes, requiring the company to collaborate with individual customers to design each one's desired product or service, which is then constructed from a base of pre-engineered modules that can be assembled in myriad ways." - Do You Want to Keep Your Customers Forever?, B. Joseph Pine II, Don Peppers, and Martha Rogers, Harvard Business Review, Mar-April 1995