Leading practices for design-to-cost of mass customisable products

While implementing the concept of mass customisation, manufacturers in the past mainly focused on ways of fulfilling individual customer needs to enhance product differentiation. This one-sided focus led to a permanent increase in product-related costs due to the growing complexity of the products and their underlying processes. Activities to improve the cost structure of existing mass-customisable products during their market cycle are frequently limited by constraints in product design and process stability. However, examples from best-in-class companies show that an early integration of product cost considerations into the development process offers comprehensive possibilities of significantly limiting the ‘allowed’ level of product costs without losing the potential for differentiation. In this paper, based on our experience from several consulting projects, we demonstrate which design-to-cost approaches leading mass customisers currently undertake to rebut the presumption that customer- and function-relevant features are in contradiction to cost-effective product design.

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