Adaptive customer profile configuration in mass customization

In the twenty-first century, a company has to organize around the customer in order to be a successful and viable firm. Today, the marketplace is customer driven. Customers expect to get what they would like, with a side order of customization. This alteration of traditional organization of a company through the involvement of the customer into the configuration of the final product faces some obvious problems. The fundamental challenge is to avoid the abortion of the configuration process by the customer. The problem of adapting the process of co-creation to different customers can be solved by identification of different customer profiles that suit each individual customer's needs and limitations. The paper presents one approach in solving the presented problem, by the introduction of a methodology for adaptive involvement of customers as co-creators in mass customization of products and services.

[1]  Fabrizio Salvador,et al.  Product Information Management for Mass Customization , 2006 .

[2]  Michael Hanss,et al.  Applied Fuzzy Arithmetic: An Introduction with Engineering Applications , 2004 .

[3]  P. Loos,et al.  Product Configurators in Electronic Commerce - Extension of the Configurator Concept towards Customer Recommendation , 2003, MCPC.

[4]  H. Zimmermann,et al.  Fuzzy Set Theory and Its Applications , 1993 .

[5]  Lotfi A. Zadeh,et al.  Fuzzy Logic for Business, Finance, and Management , 1997, Advances in Fuzzy Systems - Applications and Theory.

[6]  John S. Gero,et al.  The Situated Function — Behaviour — Structure Framework , 2004 .

[7]  Richard H. Y. So,et al.  Consumer Decision Making Process in Mass Customization , 2003 .

[8]  Chun-Hsien Chen,et al.  Human-centric product conceptualization using a design space framework , 2009, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[9]  Mikael Söderman,et al.  The use and perception of methods and product representations in product development: A survey of Swedish industry , 2004 .

[10]  Alon Y. Halevy,et al.  Intelligent Internet systems , 2000, Artif. Intell..

[11]  Thorsten Blecker,et al.  Mass Customization: State-of-the-Art and Challenges , 2006 .

[12]  Zoran Anisic,et al.  Web based intelligent product configurator for thermal insulation and decoration of buildings , 2009, 2009 7th International Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics.

[13]  Frank T. Piller,et al.  Customers as co-designers , 2003 .

[14]  Frank Thomas Piller,et al.  Key research issues in user interaction with user toolkits in a mass customisation system , 2003, Int. J. Technol. Manag..

[15]  Chun-Hsien Chen,et al.  Editorial: Human-centered product design and development , 2009, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[16]  Petra Schubert,et al.  THE POWER OF PERSONALIZATION: CUSTOMER COLLABORATION AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES , 2002 .

[17]  Martin S. Lacher,et al.  SIMPLIFYING CONFIGURATION THROUGH CUSTOMER ORIENTED PRODUCT MODELS , 2003 .

[18]  N. Franke Key Research Issues in User Interaction with Configuration Toolkits in a Mass Customization System , 2002 .

[19]  Petar Cisar,et al.  True/false questions analysis using computerized Certainty-Based Marking tests , 2009, 2009 7th International Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics.

[20]  Kathrin M. Möslein,et al.  User Representation in eCommerce and Collaboration Applications , 2003, Bled eConference.

[21]  Ralf Reichwald,et al.  Customers as part of value Webs: towards a framework for webbed customer innovation tools , 2004, 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the.