Printer friendly compilations of my blog postings.
Lars Hvam and his colleagues at Denmark's Technical University (DTU) in Copenhagen have built one of the world's leading research groups in the area of product configuration and modular product design. Their approach is that you not just should build a configurator or sales system for your existing products, but hat successful configuration and mass customization demands a dedicated modular product architecture that should be developed together with the configurator.
Their work is very much driven by industry input. Lars chairs a huge industry interest group with more than 40 company members, many of them world market leaders in customization. The group is one of the strongest pillars in our community of mass customization researchers, and you have two chances to interact with them in the next weeks -- and a new book is summarizing their recent research:
(1) Industry Meeting on "Product Modularization & Variety Reduction" on Jan 31, 2008 in Copenhagen.
The presentations at the meeting will include experiences from applying the principles of product modularization for managing and reducing the number of product variants at Rolls Royce Marine, Siemens and LEGO - see the agenda and register for the meeting at this link. All presentations will be held in English!
(2) PETO’08 Conference on Service customization
As reported before, Kasper Edwards and Lars Hvam from the Technical University of Denmark are hosting this European MC event in 2008. More information here.
(3) Product Customization - A New Book by Lars Hvam, Niels Henrik Mortensen, and Jesper Riis
From the abstract (I have not received the book yet, so this is just an announcement, not a review):
For the majority of industrial companies, customizing products and services is among the most critical means to deliver true customer value and achieve superior competitive advantage. The challenge is not to customize products and services in itself – but to do it in a profitable way. The implementation of a product configuration system is among the most powerful ways of achieving this in practice, offering a reduction of the lead time for products and quotations, faster and more qualified responses to customer inquiries, fewer transfers of responsibility and fewer specification mistakes, a reduction of the resources spent for the specification of customized products, and the possibility of optimizing the products according to customer demands.
This book presents an operational procedure for the design of product configuration systems in industrial companies, based on the experience gained from more than 40 product configuration projects in companies providing customer tailored products and services.
Published by Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-71448-4
For any further information in any of the topics above, just contact Lars directly:
Lars Hvam, Chairman of the Association for Product Modeling
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Management
Technical University of Denmark
lhv@ipl.dtu.dk
Comments