Sessions
Session 29
Production Networks for Mass Customization: Ressouces and Capabilities
Tuesday Oct 6 2009
15:30-16:50
Chatzopoulos, Christos (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece)
Tsigkas, Alexander (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece)
Papantoniou, Agis (Technology Institute of Pireus, Greece)
An Approach of a Flexible Manufacturing Thinking System for Lean-Flow Implementation for Mass Customization industries
Systems thinking for the development of a flexible manufacturing system supported by methodologies of agile manufacturing, is the premise of this work. This system will be a basic platform for implementing a lean-flow manufacturing concept for a large variety of industries. Its ambition is to decrease the time of designing, scheduling and executing manufacturing in a lean-flow fashion for Mass Customization environment. In a chaotic demand, the industries know the exact details for production a very short time, after the customized order. The cost and the waste of organizing and managing the utilities and the resources are very high. In this paper, a comperhensive theory is developped, taken as a basis for the development of an IT platform. The theory concerned is the first step in order to decrease the cost of production. Such an IT-tool will be developped in the future to generate a ean-flow Compatible product named Lean-Flow product generator.
Chatzopoulos, Tsigkas, Papantoniou -presentation pdf
Chatzopoulos, Tsigkas, Papantoniou -paper pdf
Salvador, Fabrizio (Instituto de Empresa Business School, Spain)
Akpinar, Anil (Instituto de Empresa Business School, Spain)
Rungtusanatham, Manus (Johnny) (University of Minnesota, United States)
Mass Customization Revisited: Disentangling the Effects of Resource, Routine and Relational Flexibility
Most of the empirical work on mass customization focuses on the effect of resource flexibility (i.e., the capacity of tangible and intangible assets to yield multiple outputs in terms of both number and heterogeneity) on the capacity of the plant to mitigate the tradeoff between customization and efficiency. However, an increasing amount of anecdotal and case-based evidence points out the need to explore the complementing role of both routine and relational flexibility in developing the mass customization meta-capability. Starting from this premise, our paper complements past research by exploring how routine and relational flexibility affect the relationship between resource flexibility and MC. We define routine flexibility as the capacity of a manufacturing plant to recombine flexible resources in order to acquire and fulfill differentiated orders, and relational flexibility as the willingness of plant personnel to listen to and comply with customer needs. We test our theoretically motivated hypotheses using plant level data from 238 plants located in 8 countries and operating within the machinery, electronics and transportation equipment industries. Empirical results show that resource flexibility complemented by routine flexibility helps plant to have a higher MC capability whereas moderating role of relational flexibility is found to be negative.
Sippola, Jyrki (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland)
Manufacturing needs more standards when the customer will have less
One challenge of personalization in mass production is how can unique products be built while the common belief is that quality is based on eliminating variation. This paper presents one manufacturing IT architecture and some guidelines used in the design. Target has been a design that provides good flexibility and maintainability of production system yet provides easy configurability and high product quality. The paper also presents a principle how the process control data can be grouped together depending on the use of the information and highlights why the standardization of manufacturing equipment control interface is a necessity for high-volume production.
Suuronen, Juha (Tekes, Finland)
Tekes Funding, Concepts of Operations Programme