This week’s
article “Putting Customers in Charge of Design” arouses my interest to research
on customization. Nowadays, doing well in customization can reinforce the
competence of the company, because it usually a good way to earn more customers
and build reputation of the companies. But customization is very tricky thing. Large
expense on customization doesn’t necessarily bring a large customer increase. Also,
customization is very consuming. I still remember when we discussed the lean
manufacture of Toyota that they try everything to keep conformity in
manufacture. Changing the paint color during the painting process matters a lot
even, because it will decrease the efficiency of manufacture line. Then it’s
very difficult to customize and keep low cost and high efficiency at the same
time.
After research
on the customization topic, I found an article “Customization: Impact on
product and process performance”. From this article, I got some ideas about how
to realize customization with lower cost.
First,
customized products are very dependent on higher performance and quality of
products. Another primary requirement for customization is tailoring the
product to unique customer needs and make sure that is what the unique need
matches with. However, it’s not that easy to satisfy these two requirements. The
first obstacles is obtaining the information of customer’s requirement is not
easy. Because most of time, even customer themselves can’t articulate what kind
of customization they need. Second, because of the complexity of customization,
it doesn’t necessary result in higher performance and customer satisfactory.
From
above, we can get the critical problems to identify in customization. First,
decide the optimal degrees of customization. Second, design the proper and
efficient manufacture process for customized products.
To solve
the first problem, the development of Internet has facilitated to solve the
first problem. Companies can get customers preference from the mass audience
for the customized products for free. What they should do is to analyze the
data and get useful information from it. Realization of customization has a lot
of successful practices in IT industry. Dell’s practice is a good example. They
let customers to select what they want on internet and configure the computer of
their own choice, and these computers haven’t been built at this time. After Dell
receives the money, they begin to build it. Customization is easier for IT
industry because the products are very flexible and easy to assemble. The example
in the reading article “Putting Customers in Charge of Design” also shows a
good way to facilitate customization. Customers design and choose the component
of product on Internet, and then make the order. The wisdom here is that
customers can only choose the customization from the one that Blank Label can
provide. And this is also thanks to the use of internet. Blank Label also does
well in intriguing customers on customization by sales and advertisement.
Customization
has its limit to different industry. For example, in auto industry, it’s much
more complex and difficult to assemble a car than a computer. Then the method
of build to order approach is hard to utilize in auto industry. Doing forecast
for customization is also quite difficult and can easily end in redundant inventory.
Sources:
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