MASS CUSTOMIZATION

Mass customization can be defined as producing goods and services to meet individual customer’s needs with near mass production efficiency [1]. This term was coined to parallel mass production that relied on producing large volumes of identical products like the Ford Model T line. The fundamental difference between mass production and mass customization is in the amount of product variety that is enabled by the process. Pine popularized this concept in the 1990s [2]. Over the years, it has been popular to claim that a firm provides high degree of variety in offerings, therefore the term mass customization has been overused. Customization is everywhere—it is the degree of customization and the way it is offered that may be different. Automotive firms allow limited customization of individual cars through bundled options like air conditioning and leather are offered typically with an automatic transmission; Burger King offers ‘‘Have it your way’’ burgers that enable customers to selectively customize ingredients in their burgers; Dell computers and other electronics manufacturers successfully adapted customization to enable customers to pick and choose the key modules (such as memory, disk drive, chipset) that are associated with the computer; Sun Microsystems Java applets as well as the more popular Apple iPod and iPhones take this customization to the next level wherein the hardware is identical, but the software components (applets or iTunes files) are chosen by the customer according to their choice; the BuildA-Bear experience wherein the customer