Coordinating product and process variety for mass customized order fulfilment

Traditional mass production offers a limited variety of products, in which order processing mostly concentrates on the acquisition of customer needs, and support for the sales configuration at most. With mass customization, the fulfilment of customized orders involves frequent design changes and recurrent process variations due to product differentiation. It is imperative to manage the complexity and large variety associated with customer orders, product design and production planning. This paper adopts a holistic view of order fulfilment encompassing sales, design and production. The principle of collaborative product and process variety management is presented. The paper develops a coordination mechanism of variant handling based on the specification of variety handlers and their states. A product-process variety grid is introduced to unify product data and routing information. Also proposed is a coding-based system for effective variety management. A Web-based collaborative platform is outlined to support distributed order fulfilment among multiple functional departments.

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