Mass Customization & Open Innovation News

Distributed user manufacturing network started: Ponoko and ShopBot announce partnership to provide users access to over 6,000 digital fabricators around the world

During the 2007 US Presidential debates, journalist Tom Brokaw asked candidates Obama and McCain whether our challenges would be best solved by ... "funding a Manhattan-style project or by supporting 100,000 garages across America to encourage the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?"

A new website takes the second approach! Inspired by Tom Brokaw's question to the presidential candidates, 100Kgarages is a community of workshops all over the world that are run by "Fabbers", with digital fabrication tools for precisely cutting, machining, drilling, or sculpting the components of any user  project.

The site has been launched on Sept. 16 by Ponoko and ShopBot, expanding the opportunities for ordinary users to get almost anything custom made and delivered from local state-of-the-art digital makers.

I have written several times about Ponoko in my blog, an online marketplace for everyone to make real things. It brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers. Since its launch in 2007, more than 30,000 user-generated designs "have been instantly priced online" (the official wording in the press release, I believe this means "uploaded and finished", but not ordered and delivered).

ShopBot is a manufacturer of affordable, high-performance CNC tools for digital fabrication of wood, plastic and aluminum products. With more than 6,000 ShopBots in thousands of shops in the US and 54 countries around the world, ShopBot is one of the largest producers of CNC routers in North America.

With the cooperation of the both companies and the launch of the 100kGarages website, anyone can get their ideas made locally with the click of a mouse, and delivered within just a few days.

Users can go to the site to get things custom made by searching a map for a local garage workshop, or submitting a request and choosing from bids placed by a range of ShopBot owners to make almost anything. It’s free for everyone to search and submit requests, and for fabricators to post profiles and bids.

People are creating a wide range of products like tables, chairs, cabinets, car parts, signage, boats, musical instruments, gaskets, sheds, housing and all of those impossible to find things made from wood, plastic, metal and composite materials.

“Our partnership means everyone now has easy access to their own local 3D fabricator. This is the first step to providing a solution for the doers and makers out there who want to join in re-building America, one garage at a time.”, says ShopBot’s President Ted Hall in the press release.

In the moment, the site still looks a bit beta, but it is a great starting point and another sign of the coming age of user manufacturing.

(Updated) Will New Coca-Cola Vending Machine Allow Ultimate Customization at the Point-of-Sale?

Update: Coca Cola just contacted me and revealed the brand name for this venture: Coca Cola Freestyle(TM), see press release below!

Finally a concept could become reality that Joe Pine has described more than 16 years ago (as a future dream scenario) in his book "Mass Customization": The ultimate soda fountain that offers unlimited choice, as Owen Morris in a newspaper article and Tim Stevens in Engadget.com report. (Note: I could not get more information about this concept. But if you know more, please drop me a line as I am very interested in these kind of localized customization devices).

 Currently, your typical soda fountain in a fast-food joint features perhaps eight to ten standard choices, usually offering nothing more exotic than "peach flavored ice tea." These machines work through syrup bags. The restaurant buys a bag from Coke or Pepsi, hooks it up to a soda (water) line and then the fountain combines the carbonated water with the syrup to create your soda. The machines are limited by soda lines, which tend to gunk up with sugar mold, and by bulky soda bags that weigh 30 pounds or more.

The new Coke machine is completely different. Coca-Cola has announced a new soda fountain that can hold more than 100 sodas. That's ten times more than current soda fountains.

The new fountain is like an ink printer with space for hundreds of cartridges. Each cartridge contains a concentrated formula of ingredients. When you press your choice, say Diet Coke, the machine will tell cartridge 12 to release three squirts, cartridge 81 two squirts and so on, then it combines it with carbonated water and you get the same drink as old machines.

But: The new fountains can hold a lot more of these little cartridges, so they can handle a lot more flavors. Coca-Cola promises 120 different drinks, but there could be even more as the technology gets better and the company gets more confident. You think these are way to many choices for a standard drink like sodas? Think again; Already today, Coca-Cola is listing more than 2,800 beverages on their website! And I personally would love to have a German "Apfelschorle" with still water and a 20:80 mix of juice to water … something even waiters have a problem to bring in a restaurant.

The first new fountains are rolling out in Atlanta and California in this spring. Assuming tests there go well and the public loves its overwhelming choices, the new fountains would come to other US cities next year.

But there may be a downside: How will Coke protects its customers from the paradox of choice, when too many options overwhelm our brains and shuts them down from making a decision. Just think of the lines as "the thirsty yet indecisive ponder 15 different flavors of Diet Coke?" (Tim Stevens).

---

Update: Press release from The Coca Cola Company on April 28, 2009:

THE COCA-COLA COMPANY INVITES CONSUMERS TO EXPERIENCE “FREESTYLE”
New Proprietary Fountain Dispenser Gets a Brand Name

ATLANTA, Apr. 28, 2009 – The next generation fountain beverage dispenser has a “stylish” new name.

North America today revealed that “Coca-Cola Freestyle TM” is the brand name and logo for its new proprietary fountain dispenser entering market testing this summer.  The fountain’s brand name captures its ability to deliver unprecedented beverage variety to suit any consumer taste – all packaged in an innovative and interactive fountain experience. 

“Coca-Cola Freestyle brings to life the refreshingly positive outlook that has always been associated with Coca-Cola,” said Chandra Stephens-Albright, Group Director of Marketing and Business Development for the brand. 

“It brings back the magic of the fountain of the past, re-imagines it for the future and then takes it a step farther by celebrating the idea that consumers can truly have their say at fountain – with choices tailored completely for them.”

The new self-serve fountains – which represent a complete departure from equipment The Coca-Cola Company has offered before – have been in development for nearly four years.  The sleek new units being tested are touch screen operated, enabling consumers to select from more than 100 calorie and no-calorie brands – including varieties of waters, juices, teas and sparkling beverages that have never been sold in the United States.

The Coca-Cola Freestyle dispenser uses proprietary PurePour Technology™ to make dozens of branded beverages fresh to order, in the same amount of space as the current eight-valve machine.  It will be tested in select quick-serve restaurants in Orange County, Calif., and Atlanta this summer before a wider introduction currently planned for early next year.

Cracking the Code of Mass Customization: New MIT SMR Paper

Most companies can benefit from mass customization. The key is to think of it as a process for aligning an organization with its customers’ needs.

In the current issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring 2009 Issue), Fabrizio Salvador, Pablo Martin de Holan and I discuss how mass customization should be not any longer seen as a specialized business strategy but as a bundle of capabilities that could make sense for most businesses.

In the paper, we suggest that mass customization is not some exotic approach with limited application. Instead, it is a strategic mechanism that is applicable to most businesses, provided that it is appropriately understood and deployed. This kind of thinking also is the underlying logic of our upcoming Mass Customization Executive Education Class at IE Business School.

In the paper, we suggest three common capabilities that will determine the fundamental ability of a company to benefit from mass customization thinking:

(1) Solution Space Development.  A mass customizer must first identify the idiosyncratic needs of its customers, specifically, the product attributes along which customer needs diverge the most. (This is in stark contrast to a mass producer, which must focus on identifying central tendencies so that it can target those needs with a limited number of standard products.) Once that information is known and understood, a business can define its “solution space,” clearly delineating what it will offer -- and what it will not.

(2) Robust Process Design.  Next, a mass customizer needs to ensure that an increased variability in customers’ requirements will not significantly impair the firm’s operations and supply chain.  This can be achieved through robust process design -- the capability to reuse or recombine existing organizational and value-chain resources -- to deliver customized solutions with near mass-production efficiency and reliability

(3) Choice Navigation. Lastly, a mass customizer must support customers in identifying their own problems and solutions while minimizing complexity and the burden of choice.  It is important to remember that, when a customer is exposed to myriad choices, the cost of evaluating those options can easily outweigh the additional benefit from having so many alternatives. The resulting syndrome has been called the “paradox of choice,” in which too many options can actually reduce customer value instead of increasing it.  In such situations, customers might postpone their buying decisions and, worse, classify the vendor as difficult and undesirable. To avoid that, a company can provide choice navigation to simplify the ways in which people explore its offerings

But a company does not have to apply all three capabilities in full scope together. For many companies, it already is a great step forward to just work on one of these capabilities to get more customer-centric without, however, having to master the full complexity of a mass customization system.

Read the full article and learn more how these capabilities can be implemented in practice. MIT offers the full paper for free after registration on the SMR website. You also can purchase it there  ($6.50) for further distribution.

Context:

• Posting about the paper in the MIT blog.
• Reference to the article: Fabrizio Salvador, Martin de Holan and Frank Piller: Cracking the Code of Mass Customization. MIT Sloan Management Review, 50 (2009) 3 (Spring 2009): 70-79.
• Free online access to the paper.

Embedded Toolkits: Participate in Our Survey on the Next Generation of Configurators in the Automotive Industry

My research group in Aachen is working on a nice project (EMOTIO) on the next generation of customization toolkits. Our idea is to extend the conventional configuration of custom products before you order the product by an embedded solution that would allow you to configure your product while you are using it!

We need your feedback on how you evaluate this idea. There is a short (15 min) survey that presents you some use cases of such an embedded toolkits:

Survey in English language: http://www.embedded-toolkits.com/survey/ (there also is a German language version) (it will take not more than 15 mins to answer).

Funded by the IMP-Project Fund within Germany's "Elite initiative", our project wants to pilot these toolkits and get a better understanding on their acceptance by users.

With our survey, we study this phenomenon in the automobile sector. Cars are rather complex products that include a wide array of features and characteristics. There also is a lot of configuration of cars before you buy it. But in the usage stage, you can just adapt your seats and similar changes. With some future technology, customizing a car while you are using it, however, could go much further!

In general, think of an embedded auto toolkit as a user interface that is supposed to enable drivers to change certain features or vehicle characteristics of their car at any time after the purchase. This idea is based on the assumption that users develop new customer needs during the usage period of a product. By using the product the users realize needs that they did not think about when buying the product. Thus, by the means of an “embedded configurator”, certain design decisions are postponed into the user domain and the fit to market can be improved. You will get the idea from the scenarios presented in the survey, so please participate!

Survey in English language und in Deutscher Version

We will publish a summary of the feedings here! For more information on this project, contact me or Frank Steiner.

Context information:

- Our internal project site with background information on this use case.
- A link to the general project website.

Will Mass Customization Profit from the Financial Crisis?

Some hope in these though days. Louis Columbus wrote a nice commentary on the Product Configurator Blog. His idea: Offering customizable products may pay a big dividend in a recession. While Louis probably is biased in his view – he works for configuration system provider CINCOM Systems -- his thoughts still make a good and valid argument.

His arguments include not just product configuration systems for one-of-a-kind products, i.e. the typical mass customization situation, but also using configurators to better match an assortment with customer preferences (as in the MVM application in the previous posting).

Louis sees three key factors that favor the adoption of sales and product configuration are emerging even in these difficult economic times (with my comments in italics):

"First, there a greater need than ever to sell to customers how they want to buy. Sounds so fundamental yet it is so difficult for manufacturers to change how they sell – because those practices and processes get engrained into a company and they are difficult to change." The recent crisis may finally facilitate the change management process required within companies when moving from a conventional sales approach to a customized one.

"Second, there’s more of a focus on how to capture complex orders right the first time than ever before. Driven by the increasing coordination that distributed order management, ERP, logistics and supply chain systems provide to deliver greater responsiveness to customers; manufacturers are no longer staying complacent with multiple versions of an order.  Instead there’s a greater intensity of focus on product configuration as a means to capturing a complex, build-to-order, configure-to-order or engineer-to-order product requirements thoroughly and completely the first time." Again, when times are tough, you focus on efficiencies. And while implementing a product configuration system (or a match-to-order system as MVM is offering) comes at a cost, it can have savings that are many times larger than the investment – despite offering better customer service at the same time.

"Third, product configuration has proven to be the single greatest differentiator for companies intend on making their entire brands and unique value propositions more focused on being customer-centric. Look at Dell, HP, IBM, GE and even Lexus to see examples of how product configuration can be used for accentuate and strength a brand." No further comment – despite that the company names quoted by Louis are also a sign that just offering product configuration is not enough. Just think of Dell's ongoing challenges to re-invent the company for a time where getting exactly the right computer matching to your needs is not a large advantage for customers anymore (as any machine can do almost everything what you want to do).

Conclusion: "Product configuration strategies open new avenues of selling and give competitive companies the ability to stay strong." Well said, Louis!

MVM Visual Search - Free Webinar on new shopping personalization technology

In September last year, My Virtual Model (MVM) unveiled a first-of-its-kind personalization technology in a partnership with Sears and IBM (Note: I am using the term personalization according to my own definition, i.e. it refers to a customized shopping experience – I will work on an update on this definition soon).

Struggling retailer Sears is investing heavily in its web-site to counterbalance decreasing sales in stores by a great web experience, probably the right way to do! As part of this effort, Sears.com was the first company in the world to integrate MVM's new 3D visual search and e-commerce capability on its site. Now, after the x-mas shopping rush, Sears confirmed that the technology significantly improved and enhanced a consumer’s online shopping experience. Sears was the first retailer to apply both a visual search and virtual model to an entire catalog online.

The Sears site allows consumers to recreate their in-store shopping experience online by enabling them to search for merchandise using images versus words, and to virtually “try on” selected items using a personalized model of themselves to ensure that the style, color, pattern and fit are right before purchasing.

It is a great advancement in personalization and online experience (Disclaimer: I served on MVM's board of directors, so I may be a bit biased in my positive evaluation :-)

Next week, Louise Guay, President and Founder of My Virtual Model, is offering a free series of Webinars where the visual search application will be demonstrated, and where Louise also will comment on the achievements and challenges of this technology.

Louise will make a 30 minute presentation on:
- January 21, 12PM (ET)
- January 21,  4PM (ET)
- January 22,  4PM (ET)
- January 23, 12PM (ET)

To register for a Webinar, go here.

Topics of the Webinar:

• 3D Visual Search: use Key-Images to find what you are looking for sooner.
• How to create a scalable solution that covers 100% of your product assortment.
• Outfitting: create inspirational fashion looks.
• Targeted recommendations based on shopper’s profile and behavioral patterns.
• How to uses MVM to drive qualified traffic to your site.
• News from the Virtual Model community.

Update (Jan 20, 2008): Today, MVM announced its new Jeans Finder in cooperation with IndiDemin:

For more information, go their site. More information about indiDemin is in this previous posting.

Term Wars: 3D-Printing, Additive Fabrication, Fabbing, Rapid Manufacturing, Layered Manufacturing

In an interesting contribution to the "Rapid Prototyping mailing list" (rapid.lpt.fi), Terry Wohlers, CEO of Wohlers Associates, Inc., a technology consultancy, comments on the difficulties to find an appropriate term for a technology that has been covered often in this blog, as it is a key enabler of both mass customization and new forms of user innovation.

This technology refers to the group of processes that builds parts layer by layer direct from 3D data, without the need for tools or molds. Terry, who prefers the name additive fabrication, describes these technologies as follows on his web site:

Additive fabrication (AF) refers to a group of technologies used for building physical models, prototypes, tooling components, and even finished series production parts—all from 3D computer-aided design (CAD) data, medical scans, or data from 3D scanning systems. Unlike CNC machines, which are subtractive in nature, AF systems join together liquid, powder, or sheet materials to form parts that may be impossible to fabricate by any other method. Based on thin horizontal cross sections taken from a 3D computer model, AF machines produce plastic, metal, ceramic, or composite parts, layer upon layer.

I previously used the term "rapid manufacturing" for these technologies. This term should show the evolution from "rapid prototyping". For many years, AF technologies have been used in most cases to quickly build a prototype during a new product development process. Today, however, prototyping is only one of many applications for these technologies. In his posting to the mailing list, Terry discusses what the best term is – and concludes that it should be "3D-Printing". Here are some excerpts (in rearranged order):

AF processes are being used for a range of applications including concept design and modeling, fit and function testing, patterns for castings, and mold and die tooling. They are also used for fixture and assembly tools, custom and replacement part manufacturing, special edition products, short-run production, and series manufacturing. Prototyping is one of many applications and that's why "RP" is no longer suitable in most instances as a catch-all term. In fact, many companies resist the idea of using a prototyping method for part manufacturing, so using this term could stifle AF's transition to manufacturing applications.

This may be the reason why he also resists to the term "rapid manufacturing" (and, when reading his comments, I also agree that this term is not precise enough, as also a good old injecting molding process is very "rapid"! The term also has been used for very different manufacturing concepts). EOS has been proposing the term "e-manufacturing" to focus on the fact that the parts are produced directly from 3D-data. But also a CNC machine is doing so.

... A growing number of people are using terms such as "additive fabrication" or "additive manufacturing" ...  The mainstream press -- when our industry is lucky enough to get included in it -- uses "3D printing" most frequently. Among industry insiders, 3D printing refers to a group of AF processes that are relatively low cost, easy to use, and office friendly ...

The term "additive manufacturing" is fine, although because manufacturing is an application and not a technology, I believe it is plagued with problems, similar to "rapid prototyping." Consider, for example, this sentence: "My company is using additive manufacturing for manufacturing." It's confusing. Now, consider this: "My company is using solid freeform fabrication for manufacturing." Much cleaner.

I'm not suggesting that we use "solid freeform fabrication;" I'm using it here to illustrate a point. I believe it works much better when the catch-all term does not include the name of an application. That way it can be used cleanly for all applications of the technology.
 
Since 2005 I've used the catch-all term "additive fabrication" in our company's publications, presentations, and communications. It's not perfect, but it works. In the future, I truly believe that "3D printing" will become the most popular term. When I'm describing AF technology to ... someone I'm seated next to on an airplane, I use 3D printing because there's a better chance that he/she will understand what I'm saying. It's simple and easy to say. I prefer it over alternatives, but 3D printing currently means something else to many people in our industry.

This is likely to change. An estimated 74% of all systems sold in 2007 were classified as a 3D printer and each year this percentage increases.

I believe these comments make a lot of sense. I cannot promise that I will not any longer use "rapid manufacturing", but I think that "3D printing" (in a non expert environment) and additive fabrication in a technical context are very good terms to describe where I am excited about. And fabbing is nice jargon when you want to refer to additive fabrication and stay cool.

And Google is confirming this claim. Here are the number of hits when you search for the terms:

3D printing 7,930,000
Rapid manufacturing 567,000
Additive fabrication 441,00
Fabbing 88,000
Layered fabrication 36,400

Rapid Prototyping: 1,620,000

This said, however, an important disclaimer: I do not think that these new technologies will solve all problems of MC manufacturing or become the dominant fabrication technologies. For rather a long time, they will remain niche technologies, and low-cost or advanced subtractive technologies like laser cutting or CNC machines still provide plenty of great opportunities for customized manufacturing.

Personal Fabrication for Dummies -- Teaching Videos at Replicator, Inc.

I just discovered the great new blog by Joseph Flaherty, founder of a start-up called Replicator, Inc. While the company will launch in full speed in February 2009, they already were quite successful in securing seed money and attention in a number of important start-up competitions (MIT 100K  (semi-finals), Princeton (semi-finals), and the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition (runner up prize winner)).

I hope that we can meet Joseph at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar in three weeks.

Replicator, Inc., manufactures and sells custom consumer products. Their first product is custom jewelry for tween and teenage girls, sold under the name WhirlyBelle. This is made possible by combining web-based design tools with custom manufacturing

His company blog not just has a recent posting about 47 words you can not use on custom Nike sneakers (which I do not quote here to get my blog not banned from your corporate content filter). In another posting, he has a great chart about the price premiums you can gain with mass customization:

A great number of postings covers user manufacturing and the new opportunities for users to produce anything they want. In one of my favorite posts, Joseph explains all technologies that enable personal fabrication. You probably also could Google those, but Joseph created a great posting with small videos explaining all technologies.

Many people think 3D printers are the way this will happen, but there are half a dozen other amazing technologies that allow people to make anything they can imagine.

While by no means an exhaustive list, his list is a is a very convenient overview for anyone interested in how the idea user co-design meets manufacturing. As Joseph writes:

"Combined with web-based design tools these technologies could enable a change as profound as the industrial revolution: increasing the options for customers while reducing the environmental impact."

His posting shows examples of these machines in action and provides a glimpse of what is possible already today:

1. 3D Printers (some notable examples: Z Corp., Dimension, 3d systems, Objet, Desktop Factory, Paragon Lake, Figure Prints, EOS)

2. Laser Cutters  (Notable Examples: Epilog, Trotec, Etchstar, Ponoko, VersaLaser)

3. Waterjet Cutters (Notable Examples: OMAX, Flow Corp, OCC)

4. 2D Plotter Cutters (Notable Examples: Cricut, CraftRobo, Xyron)

5. Print on Demand (Notable Companies: Blurb, Lulu, Shutterfly)

6. Direct To Garment Printing (Notable Companies: Cafe Press, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Spoonflower)

7. CNC Milling (Notable Examples: eMachine Shop, Tech Shop, Craftsman Compucarve)

8. CNC Embroidery (Notable Examples: Singer, Brother, Toyota)

9. Cut & Sew Construction (Notable Examples: NIKEiD, Timbuk2, Freitag)

10. 3D Scanning (Notable Examples: Z Corp., Next Engine, 3D Digital Corp., Corpus-e)

Go to his web site to watch all videos

MIT Seminar on Mass Customization - Meet the Thoughtleaders in the Field

MIT Faculty Club, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, November 10-11, 2008

Another event ... but one that we believe will matter and create value: We are inaugurating the MIT Annual Smart Customization Seminar. Its foremost idea is to connect managers in peer-to-peer interaction to foster an intense discussion, facilitated by presentations from industry leaders and the Smart Customization Group faculty. The seminar's core faculty consists of Mass Customization guru B. Joseph Pine II, MIT Design Lab Director William Mitchell, and myself (Frank Piller).

The seminar provides a unique opportunity everyone working on, implementing, or considering mass customization and personalization strategies and technologies (note: it is organized in the style of the MIT Executive Education, so there are no student discounts, etc.).

The MIT Smart Customization Seminar is the only event of its kind in North America and provides an in-depth coverage of one of today's most important business trends. The objective of the 2008 seminar is to take an intensive look on the success factors and "how to do it” aspects of mass customization and personalization.

For more information, the preliminary agenda, and registration please refer to the agenda in the attachment and our seminar web site: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/smartcustomization/

Space in the seminar is limited, so reserve your seat today, and also enjoy the early registration discount until October 24, 2008.

Conference invitation: 3rd International Conference on Rapid Manufacturing (RM) to be held at Loughborough University on July 9 and 10

Rapid Manufacturing, also know as direct, digital, generative manufacture or additive fabrication, is one of the most exciting emergent technologies available to mass customize today. RM uses 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) data to directly 'print' or 'grow' parts in a variety of polymeric, metallic, ceramic and organic materials. When fully implemented, it allows almost unlimited variety at no extra variable cost. Old paradigms of optimizing between switching and inventory cost will go away. While the potential of these technologies have been discussed since years, only very recently a larger scale of commercial application has begun.

The most exciting application of rapid manufacturing, in my perspective, is its enabling role for user manufacturing (previous postings on the topic). A new generation of rather cheap machines is coming to the market now promise to replicate the development we had in the printing industry: Form large printing presses to large laser printing systems to the desktop printer. The same may happen to manufacturing. From large centralized factories to decentralized plants to a factory on your desk.

The International Conference on Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is the world's only conferences focused on this trend. Organized by some core members of our mass customization community, the Rapid Manufacturing Group at Loughborough University in the UK, the conference focuses solely on the application of 'end use parts', made using additive layer manufacturing technologies.

The past events have been attended by over 150 delegates and speakers from around the world. The event provides a two day showcase of invited speakers, including the very best in both academic RM research activity and commercial RM applications. The event also plays host to a parallel technology and materials exhibition supported by leading RM systems vendors exclusively for conference delegates.

The program is divided in an academic and a business stream. Topics presented in the business track include:

- Developing a business case for customized RM
- RM for the home based market
- Ultrasonic Consolidation
- Developing intellectual property in RM product
- Pushing the boundaries of RM consumer products
- The socio-economic benefits of RM
- DMLS for high performance RM applications
- Quality management in RM using non destructive testing

The conference further will cover process and materials issues, design opportunities, management and organizational issues and industrial applications, making the conference of relevance to engineers, designers and business managers, as well as academics and researchers and RM materials and system developers.

For more information, registration, and the full program, please go to http://www.rm-conference.com/index.htm

Aberdeen Group Report Published: Configuring Profits to Order: Best Practices in Mass Customization in Industrial Markets

A few weeks ago I offered you the chance to participate in a study by Aberdeen Group, a technology research company. Now, the results of this research have been published. The study focused on the use of configurators and customization strategies in industrial markets (b-to-b). Many manufacturers here are seeking to win business by offering their customers products configured specifically for them.

However, capturing and validating exactly what customers want, accurately quoting orders, and still delivering products quickly is challenging. Companies that are successfully addressing these challenges are able to reap the benefits of higher product profitability. Some are even seeing product profit margins improve by up to 80%, just by using configurator solutions.

The research report found, that:

- Best-in-Class reduce write-offs by 26.2 times by minimizing order errors with sales configurators.
- Best-in-Class are 20% more likely to accurately predict costs used to develop quotes for custom products, allowing them to achieve higher profit margins.
- Best-in-Class are 14% more likely to meet the customer’s promised delivery date with design rules to automate the creation of sales and design deliverables
- Best-in-Class achieve higher customer satisfaction by offering 3.5-times as many customizable product features as Industry Average companies
- Best-in-Class are 18% more likely to hit revenue targets with integrated sales and product configurators.

The research found that the biggest performance differentiator of the companies surveyed is in their ability to predict cost. "The key to being profitable is in knowing what the costs will be and developing an accurate, yet competitive quote," the report states. "To accomplish this, companies must look at the unique challenges of their business and implement the capabilities and enablers that will provide more visibility and predictability to cost.”

Another finding also stresses the need of a stringend product configuration system and corresponding product structures. Best-in-Class companies report only US $31,400 in lost revenue due to quote or order errors. In comparison, the Industry Average report write-offs of US $823,900. Best-in-Class companies are better equipped to accurately capture what their customers want and process, engineer, and manufacture the order with far fewer errors. The research concludes:

"Companies who have not deployed a configuration solution will be at a competitive disadvantage and will forego the benefits of higher profit margins. A sales configurator alone can translate to profit margins that are 12% higher. An integrated sales, product and manufacturing configurator solution can mean profit margins that are 21% higher."

Context:
# Download a free copy of the report here.
# Posting about a similar report on the configuration practice of industrial companies.
# Configurator database: Get inspiration by browsing though hundreds of configuration solutions in all industries.

Mass Customization in the Construction Industry: Industry Tour Visits Custom Home Manufacturers in Japan

This sounds like the best of all worlds: "Zero-Energy" and "mass customization" in one home. I met Dr Masa Noguchi, a scholar at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art on the MCPC 2007 conference, where he was presenting at in the "Mass Customization & Architecture" track.

Masa is doing plenty of research on mass customization of homes, and coming from Japan, he has access to the manufacturers of the leading nation when it comes to the industrial fabrication of highly customized homes (pre fabs 2.0).

His institute is offering a unique field trip ("the mission") to see mass customization in this industry in practice during the

PV ZERO-ENERGY MASS CUSTOM HOME MISSION TO JAPAN 2007, 10-12 September, 2008.

From the announcement:

"The PV Zero-Energy Mass Custom Home Mission to Japan 2008 is aimed at offering industry professionals, academics and government officers opportunities to visit not only the state-of-the-art production facilities of five leading housing manufacturers in Japan, but also the sales center where a number of model homes are displayed allowing potential home buyers to examine the quality.

The mission also extends its visit to an existing solar community that consists of 100 prefabricated homes that are usually equipped with solar photo voltaic power generating systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese housing manufacturers focused solely on the mass production of their products, resulting in a supply of virtually identical, rather monotonous houses.

Due to the inferior image associated with the low-quality appearance of these mass produced houses, the public immediately rejected industrialized homes. Since then, the manufacturers have placed greater emphasis on improving housing quality, and thereby customer satisfaction, such that Japanese housing manufacturers today enjoy a reputation for providing reasonably-priced quality housing that, while still mass-produced, is customized—i.e. mass customization.

Japanese housing manufacturers are successful in commercializing their industrialized houses that are often equipped with a PV system, as a standard feature rather than options. In fact, between 1994 and 2003, the number of domestic PV installations in Japan drastically increased from 539 to 52,863 houses. Although the country has been experiencing the negative fluctuation of housing starts over the last few years, the PV housing manufacturers express their confidence in the increase of their sales for years to come.

The mission corresponds with the global market needs and demands for housing of today and tomorrow and helps the participants gain the knowledge of contemporary housing technologies being implemented for the commercialization of marketable and reproducible zero-energy houses.

For more information, please look in this PDF file with more information, or contact Dr Masa Noguchi, Mission Coordinator, at m.noguchi@gsa.ac.uk. Or go here for more information: http://www.masscustomhome.com.

Research Project Presents Custom-Fit Motorbike Helmet

A recent survey revealed that many motorcyclists have problems in finding a perfect fitting helmet. Mass production cannot solve this issue. Today, partial personalization is done by offering the consumer the choice between with different paddings. But a new manufacturing philosophy is needed to produce a fully customised helmet, perfectly formed to the geometrical features (=head) of a user.

Research from the Custom-fit Project, funded by 6th framework program of the EU, offers a solution: fully personalised helmets at a cost effective rate. The starting point is the 3D scanning of the rider’s head shape, using a laser scanner developed by Custom fit partner Human Solutions. The scanned surface model represents the reference point from where adaptations are made on a standard design, resulting in a helmet design, perfectly shaped to the rider's head (carried out with a specialised CAD tool from the project partner Delcam).

Finally the customised part of the helmet, the liner, is manufactured using a new Rapid Manufacturing machine (a Power Printing Process tool developed in the project by DeMonfort University) which builds the product layer by layer with a high productivity by sintering polymeric powders specifically selected for the new process.

The main issue with custom helmet is safety. While the custom production offer large advances with regard to comfort due to better fit, the safety prepositions of a laser sintered product are still open. To improve this factor, the customised helmets use the same amount of expanded polistyrene that is used in standard and certified helmets (this material is principally responsible for the function of shock absorption). Moreover, some special customisation of the mechanical characteristics of the customised liner should increase safety level, for example lowering the tendency of the helmet to be pulled off the head during riding.

The project has also dealt with the reorganization of service and delivery, by studying a new way to interact with customers form the moment they start the order process, where the head needs to be 'scanned', to the point in which the customised helmet is delivered. All modification to the supply chain have been studied. Initially the rider/customer will probably face an increase in price and delivery time to have a Custom Fit helmet. Nevertheless they will be rewarded by being the owner of a unique, custom-made helmet, not only more comfortable but safer as well.

Context: Custom-Fit is an industry led project to investigate the possibility of moving towards knowledge based manufacturing and customised production through integration of knowledge in Rapid Manufacturing, Information Technology and Material Science. I am serving as a scientific adviser of the project. Funded under the Sixth Framework Programme, the project involves 30 partners from around Europe. The aim is to create a fully integrated system for the design, production and supply of individualised products. It has targeted product for implementing the new technology, including motorcycle seats, helmets, implants and prosthesis.

Great Report on User Manufacturing, Mass Customization, and How a New Infrastructure is Providing New Opportunities for SMEs

Last week, I got a note by Steve King, a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. This is a non-profit research group based in Silicon Valley. Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, the IFTF today publishes reports to help people and companies to understand what is coming next.

They recently released a forecast report that is part of a series on the future of small business. In this report, they stress that small businesses will actively take advantage and use new manufacturing methods to create mass customized goods.

The report was sponsored by Intuit and can be downloaded on their website: http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/ (download Report #3)

In the report, IFTF writes about a new artisan economy that is the result of new manufacturing technologies, enabling individuals to access similar production technologies as large corporations (crafters using Ponoko, see previous posting, are a perfect example). It is a very nice summary of many of the recent trends that I have discussed here. Fabbing, blogging, user manufacturing, customization, open innovation -- it's all there and brought into a nice and coherent framework.

I especially liked the part about the new infrastructure that is enabling these developments:

"Plug-and-play infrastructures will make small businesses more competitive and successful. The ability of small businesses to take advantage of large-scale infrastructures and leverage new technologies will allow them to enter and compete in industries formerly served only by big business."

As an example, they refer to a great service that is enabling moms to become entrepreneurs, Mom Inventors, Inc.:

"For those who want to avoid teh hassle of assembling these services, firms are available to do everything for an entrepreneur. Mom Inventors Ic., for example, weill develop, manufacture, and sell quality Mom invented products throughout the United States and Europe. The mom (entrepreneur) only needs to come up with the idea, Mom Inventors will do the rest."

So I am expecting to these many more knitted marvels and clever kitchen aids on the shelves, invented by "Lead Moms".

In an e-mail exchange, Steve told me more about the background of the report, and stressed another implication from their research:

"A major issue we are trying to figure out is how small business relates to mass customization and user innovation. This was originally prompted by our work looking at consumer generated media - specifically blogs.

We found that the blogs with the most traffic were not authored by consumers, but by professionals. The professionals tended to fall into two categories: (1) small or independent businesses trying to build a small publishing business; or (2) professionals using blogs to promote either themselves or the goods and services of their company. Looking deeper at the second group, we found that most of them worked for small businesses.

Based on this work (which we did several years ago), we started looking at other categories. We quickly found a similar pattern of small business participation across a broad range of categories, including media (YouTube videos, etc.), open source software, crafts and small scale manufacturing (a lot of Makers at Maker Faire are small businesses, for example), financial services, etc.

Basically, we saw small businesses playing a role in almost every category where niche products and/or services were being built or highly customized. We also found a pattern of category "power users" moving from being hobbyists to starting their own small businesses. We kept seeing "prosumers" turning into small businesses, and we kept seeing small businesses somewhere in the customization value chain."

Accordingly, another area indicated in the report where small businesses will grow in the future is to serve as an innovation lab for larger corporations. Platforms like Innocentive or P&G's connect and develop program will help small businesses to sell their creativity to larger corporations in an efficient way. This may be the next wave of contract research.

Overall, a nice summary of recent trends that is worthwhile reading due its focus on small businesses.

Context: Get the full report here. http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/ (download Report #3)

Participate at Industry Benchmarking: How good is your configuration practice?

Exclusive survey by Aberdeen Group wants to evaluate how companies are profiting from configuration. I was asked by Aberdeen to support this survey, and given their questions, I believe it is a good initiative.

How do you customize or configure your products to specific customer preferences, while maximizing profitability? The Aberdeen Group is looking to answer that question.

If your company offers a mass customization configurator, weigh in on the debate by taking a short 10 minute survey.

Each respondent who answers the survey will receive a complimentary full copy of the report containing this study's results (a $399 value). This report allows you to benchmark yourself against your industry peers. Individual responses will be kept strictly confidential and data will only be used in aggregate.

Questions the survey wants to ask:

# How do you capture and validate what your customer wants?

# What are you doing to develop accurate, yet timely quotes?

# Do you have anything in place to help automate repetitive or tedious steps of the sales or design process?

# Is reducing rework and returns of tailored products a concern for you?

Share your experiences to help us identify best practices for producing customized products that drive profitability.

We greatly appreciate your participation in this research effort and look forward to sharing our findings with you. BUT: Please only participate in the survey if you are offering customizable products in any industry.

Go here to the survey: aberdeen.com/survey/CustomIIMCP

INTELLIFIT Moves From Virtual Fitting (match-to-order) to True Mass Customization: Custom-made jeans with a high-tech twist

Intellifit is know to me as one of the leading providers of match-to-order systems in fashion retail. They currently market a special 3D full body scanner. At a retail location, the consumer enters a see-through "Intellifit Virtual Fitting Room" (the scnanner) that's 8' high and 7' wide. There, low power radio waves collect about 200 accurate body measurements in under 15 seconds – a personal “FitPrint” – while the consumer remains fully clothed. This data is used to match the user's measurements with sizing information of (standard) garments in the store.

According to the company, Intellifit has measured over 230,000 individuals to date, representing the largest sizing database of its kind in the world.

But now Intellifit customers will become enabled to use their profiles to shop for custom made jeans, and in the future, for custom pants, khakis, or shirts. Last week, the company began a test of its “Custom Jeans Center” at its company retail store outside of Philadelphia. Consumers can design their own custom-made jeans with a guarantee of a perfect fit. In the moment, retail shopping is by appointment only and includes consultation with a fashion advisor.

The customer can choose jeans from a selection of styles and washes and add details such as pocket shape and design, stitching and personalization options. The price point of the custom jeans is at about $150.

The FitPrint is transferred electronically from the retail location to the jeans manufacturer, where the garment pieces are custom-cut by computer control. The completed custom jeans are shipped directly to the customer in 3 to 4 weeks.

“This test will help us determine the scalability of the process. With a positive result, an international roll-out will be close behind,” Rob Weber, Intellifit's President, is quoted in a recent press release.

I believe that this combination of mass customization and match-to-order is a very promising way of establishing a sustainable operation. Many consumers do not want to wait for a perfect fit that is just made for them, but also are frustrated by complexity of choice and not finding their right size in a large retail store. Also, if the system finds that a standard item on stock is providing you a good fit, the retailer will have an advantage as the inventory can be reduced. On the other hand, if a consumer does not find a standard garment according to her fit and preferences, she does not have to leave the store without a puchase -- but can be transferred to the mass customization option.

For Intellifit, entering the mass customization market also is a great way to leverage the exiting investments in building such a large database of "FitPrint" customer profiles.

Context:
- For more information and store locations, go to www.intellifit.com.
- MVM's virtual model and Archetype's ZAFU are similar matching-services in the online world.
- Report about METRO's matching and in-store recommendation service

Industry Study on State of Rapid Manufacturing and the Future of Production

EOS, a leading manufacturer of laser-sintering systems, recently presented a market study on the state of laser-sintering technology for production tasks (called rapid manufacturing, e-Manufacturing or also fabbing). These technologies have been used pre-dominantly for prototyping tasks in the past where they allowed experimentation to a much higher degree. But their real economic impact comes from their role as a manufacturing technology, allowing custom manufacturing with no switching cost. It is now starting to compete with conventional casting technologies.

Rapid manufacturing delivers end products, functional parts and tools directly from CAD data. A laser heats and melts powdered plastics or metals layer by layer, until the build is complete and a final product can be taken out of the system. Whether it is jewelery, clothes, lamps, chairs or functional parts for components that are being manufactured, laser sintering and similar generative manufacturing technologies enable the creation of products with highly complex and filigreed structures and forms that are unthinkable geometries for conventional series production – and each piece can be customized at no additional cost.

EOS is, according to its own statement, the world-leading provider of this technology with revenues in laser-sintering of 59.7 million Euro in 2007, an increase of 14 percent compared to the previous year. This number shows that the market still is very small compared to the multi-billion market of traditional production equipment.

On the recent EuroMold Trade Show, the company conducted a survey among industry experts about the future of manufacturing. Is individualized series production from CAD data going to prevail in the future? And which technologies will drive this type of production? The answers on this survey have been published in a recent press release.

While no information is given on the number of respondents or any basic statistical validity, and the study obviously is biased due to its originator, here some quotes from the press release which address some questions I often get from readers of this blog:

33% of the respondents believe that individualized production with laser-sintering is already market-ready, while 37% predict the establishment of the technology in the market within the next three years. The rest anticipate the establishment of rapid manufacturing within five years, with only 4% seeing a lag of ten years.

According to the survey, rapid manufacturing is driven by the general mass customization trend. Both industry and end consumers increasingly request individually manufactured products, creating a potential demand for mass customization of those products. And this is exactly where rapid manufacturing comes into play: 28% of those interviewed said that the trend towards individualized series production is the most important factor for the success of the technology.

Nearly a quarter of the interviewees saw greater “cost savings compared to conventional technologies”.
22% judged that rapid manufacturing will overtake traditional technologies due to “shorter product life cycles”.

But rapid manufacturing with laser-sintering also faces a number of challenges: 29% of the interviewees called the limited choice of materials as the greatest barrier to implementation of rapid manufacturing technology.

Interestingly, respondents felt that the main difficulty is not so much the emerging technology itself, but rather a lack of knowledge and openness in the industry. Approximately a quarter of the respondents judged the “lack of know-how in the industry” as a hindrance. Companies are yet not aware about the technology or lack the capability to change their design and production processes in such a radical way.

Finally the interviewees were asked for their predictions about production methods 20 years in the future.
A clear majority (63%) forecast the broad establishment of mass customization in the Western world. 21% even believe that end customers will have their own mini-factories and produce their own products with rapid manufacturing. About 9% of those asked went so far as to remark that, in 20 years time, manual manufacturing will only take place on the PC.

Context:

- My previous posts on rapid manufacturing
- EOS site with case studies and more articles
- 3rd International Rapid Manufacturing Conference 2008 in the UK - I will speak there as well!

Design & Configuration of Complex Products -- Insights From DTU's Product Modeling Group, one of Europe's leading centers on the mass customization

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

Virtual Fashion Technology: New blog covers major pesonalization technology

Recently I learned about a great new blog published by Elaine Polvinen, a professor of Fashion Textile Technology at Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York. Elanie writes about "Virtual Fashion Technologies", a main enabler of mass customization and personalization in the fashion industry.

She wants to document with her blog the transition and expansion from traditional 2D designs to 2D Digital to 3D virtual for apparel textile product design, development and retailing.

Here is a selection of her recent posts:

# Transformational Avatar Retailing: The Missing Link For Mass Customization?

# A Conversation with Louise Guay from My Virtual Model

# Avatars in Second Life for Retail Marketing? It’s Not Only Coming – it’s Here! - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3.

# Highlights of MCPC 2007 in Montréal, Canada: Part 1 - Part 2

And much more at http://fashiontech.wordpress.com

MC Configurator Database Went Live - Great New Portal Provides Comprehensive Overview of Mass Customization Offerings

Additional Site Feature: MCPC 2007 video interviews with Joe Pine, Stan Davis, Mitchell Tseng and many other ...

The unpublic beta was one of the best kept secrets in the mass customization world of the last months --- now it is public: The huge database of configurators (co-design toolkits) compiled by Paul Blazek and Wolfgang Frühwirt and their team at Cyledge.com, a Vienna based consultancy in the field of configurators.

What is a configurator? Well, "simply put, a configurator is a software application for designing products exactly matching customers' individual needs", the site says. As they further explain, configurators can be found in various forms and different industries. They are employed in B2B as well as B2C markets and are operated either by trained staff or customers themselves. Whereas B2B configurators are primarily used to support sales and lift production efficiency, B2C configurators are often employed as design tools that allow customers to "co-design" their own products.

What Paul and Wolfgang do not is to document configurator software providers, but real configurators on the web ... more than 500 of them. All arranged in a nice database sorted by more than 85 criteria, including

- Steps to starting (distance to the configurator, number of web pages the user has to go through in order to get to the configurator (distance from the Homepage)

- Process navigation

- Module library (pre-customized products are available for further customization)

- Automatic completion (The configuration process can be continued even if the user ignores a required decision during the configuration process. The system completes the product automatically, meaning that the user doesn’t need to edit every step in order to continue the process)

- Loading Time (under 15 Seconds)

- 3D-perspective exists allowing the user to rotate the product picture 360°. (yes/no)

- Delivery time

- Weaknesses of the site as seen by the evaluator.

Well, for the public version they just reveal about ten criteria, but this already provides plenty of benefit. You get a great overview of what is available in the world of mass customization: Did you know that there are six custom offerings for pets, 15 for children stuff, 37 configurators in the construction and building industries? Their rubric "most exotic configurators" list Sonor GmbH & Co. KG (custom drums), our friends from Elite Vintners (custom wine), Alois Reich (custom dirndl), Brewtopia (custom coasters), Tiny Pocket People (custom pocket dolls), or A.H.Beard Pty Ltd. (custom beds for children).

And there is much more, over 50 pages of listings ().

On top, the site has a nice blog (with some re-postings from my blog), a conference database, and a great library of short videos with key persons in the mass customization world. See my interview with a spectacular multimedia trick :-), or here wiser voices like Joe Pine, Mitchell Tseng, or Stan Davis himself ... the person who has coined the term mass customization:

Most of the videos were taken at the MCPC 2007 Conference. For many more videos go to the configurator-database.com site.

Full disclosure: I am a scientific advisor of this project and the sponsoring company, cyledge.com.

Personalization in Retail: How RFID tags are helping a German retailer to provide customization of the retail experience

Roland Piquepaille wrote in a ZD-Net Blog about RFID tags that help you to choose your clothes at a German retailer close to my home.

This application fits perfectly to the discussion we had at the MCPC 2007 Business Seminar a month ago in Montreal on "A total makeover of retail". Here are some quotes from the posting:

"A German department store, the Galeria Kaufhof in Essen, part of the Metro retailing group, is using RFID technology in a new way. … Men buying clothes in this store will get automatic suggestions. For example, when you go to a dressing room to try a suit, a ’smart mirror’ will tell you what kind of shirt or tie you need to buy with it. Will this technology be deployed elsewhere? Time will tell.

… An RFID reader on a “smart mirror” in the change room determines which clothing has been brought into the room from the RFID tag attached to the apparel, then displays complementary clothing choices or accessories. The system is used in combination with ’smart shelves,’ which can read what merchandise is currently in stock, so that customers can be shown choices in sizes that are available, and in various styles and colors.

… RFID readers are installed in walls, tables, and clothing racks of the men’s department. In addition to providing METRO with data on store floor inventory in real-time, the readers enable a number of consumer-facing applications that METRO hopes will both wow customers and make their buying experience richer and more convenient. The RFID tables are hooked up to an accompanying flat screen, which displays what sizes and styles are immediately available on that table. The RFID mirrors detect which garment the customer is wearing or holding and offer recommendations for complementary items.”

And of course, all this information is extremely valuable to the retail chain. Let’s return to the Baseline article for its conclusion. “Bill Colleran, chief executive of Seattle-based Impinj, says the exciting thing about the Kaufhof deployment is that it demonstrates that RFID can be used in retail for much more than to wring out cost savings in the supply chain. With the use of business intelligence systems like smart mirrors and smart shelves, it can be a new sales driver. ‘People joke that this is the ideal place to start because men need more help” in making choices,’ he says.”

Context information:
- The full blog posting of Roland Piquepaille.
- Report in Baseline Magazine which was the source of Roland's article
- Metro press announcement
- Press release by the technology providers

Webinar: The Next Gen of Mass Customization: User Manufacturing, Instant Companies, and Customer Co-Creation (Nov 29, 2007 on your desktop)

How a new infrastructure is enabling consumers to become instant manufacturers – and your future competitor -- 10% discount for MC&OI Blog readers

I am coming back to your desktop. After the large success of an earlier webinar on mass customization, London based Pure Inisghts is organizing a second webinar on the theme, this time around my new favorite topic of user manufacturing.

The topic: We are used to have a networked laser printer on every desk in our office and in every home, enabling us to print documents on the spot which a few decades ago demanded a specialized manufacturer. The same may be happening with the production of many other goods. Today new production technologies ("fabbing") and advanced design software allow average users to produce almost everything – on their own desk. Welcome to the factory in your kitchen.

This session will discuss the upcoming user manufacturing trend, a development that recently is taking shape in larger scope and scale: User manufacturing refers to a public available software, manufacturing, and distribution infrastructure that enables creative users and customers to design, build, and sell own creations to a larger public – without the traditional investments in setting up a business. User manufacturing supplements – or substitutes – mass customization strategies which many companies have implemented. It also may become the most efficient strategy to serve the long tail of variants in many industries.

Consider Spreadshirt, one of the world's largest producers of graphic t-shirts. This company just allows everyone to create an own assortment of designs, and then sell this assortments in highly targeted retail outlets, online and offline, to a small market segment the user knows best. Thus, Spreadshirt does not have to predict the long tail of heterogeneity of fashion products, but just focuses on allowing users to create and sell this assortment by their own.

User manufacturing is enabled by three main technologies: (1) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design. (2) Design repositories where users upload, search, and share designs with other users. This allows a community of loosely connected users to develop a large range of applications. (3) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New rapid manufacturing technologies ("fabbing") finally deliver the dream of translating any 3-D data files into physical products -- even in you living room. Combining this technology with recent web technologies can open a radical new way to provide custom products along the entire "long tail" of demand.

User manufacturing builds on the notion that users are not just able to configure a good within the given solution space (mass customization), but also to develop such a solution space by their own and utilize it by producing custom products. As a result, customers are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies.

The webinar will discuss recent trends and case examples of the user manufacturing trend. We also will compare the business models of companies which are building on the user manufacturing trend and which implement and operate the underlying infrastructure ´for creative users to become manufacturers.

Planned session outline:

- A short review of conventional mass customization thinking

- Which recent trends and developments enhance these strategies and how mass customization is related to “The Long Tail” phenomena

- What is user manufacturing, and which trends does this strategy support?

- What are the components of an infrastructure that supports user manufacturing?

- A review of business models of established companies and recent startups which already successfully benefit from the opportunities of user manufacturing

- A discussion of the major challenges and open issues in this domain

- Session wrap-up: Idea for further action

To register, please go to http://www.pure-insight.com/webinars/mass-customization-next-generation and use promotional code aix (case sensitive!) wenn registering for a 10% discount.

Note: You also can download the webinar after its initial live broadcast – but only when joining live, you can interact and ask direct questions.

All further information can be found here.

Context information

- If you prefer to see the content of this webinar in action, a seminar on Fabbing and User generated Manufacturing in Essen, Germany, provides a great opportunity on Nov 22.

- My earlier posts on user manufacturing

- Article in CNN online on the fabbing trend

- Article in New Scientist on the fabbing trend

- Article in Make magazine on how to use a fabbing device

Rethinking Business: Products of tomorrow: Fabbing, personalization & custom manufacturing (Essen, 22. Nov 2007)

A VERY interesting focused event on the new world of fabbing, laser sintering, user manufacturing, and how to make business with this will take place in Essen (Germany) on Nov 22 afternoon & evening. Hosted by Z-Punkt, an innovative trend consultancy, and taking place in the Zeche Zollverein, a spectacular industrial location, the conference promised to become a real eye-opener and point of discussion.

For more information on the theme, have a look on this previous blog post: I will host a webinar on the same topic of user manufacturing on Nov 29 in case you cannot travel to Essen, Germany, for this event.

For a list of all speakers and the detailed program, please download the event flyer.

The event will be in German language, so all the following announcements are in German language as well.

Erfahren Sie, wie neue Materialien zu Innovationstreibern werden und warum der 3D-Druck das Business revolutioniert. Die Konferenz "Rethinking Business #02. Produkte von morgen" findet am 22. November 2007 auf der Zeche Zollverein in Essen statt. Themenschwerpunkte: Neue Materialien und individuelle Produktion.

Und noch mehr Informationen zum Thema finden Sie in einen Interview mit Frank Piller auf dem Z-Punkt-Blog.

Drucken wir in ein paar Jahren unser Geschirr jeden Tag frisch aus unserem persönlichen 3D-Drucker aus? Und werden die Fallschirme der Zukunft aus Nano-Spinnfäden gefertigt? Wie neue Materialien die Produktwelt von morgen prägen und welches Innovationspotenzial in einer individualisierten Produktionsweise steckt – das diskutiert Z_punkt im Rahmen der Konferenz „Produkte von morgen“ am 22. November 2007 in der Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen.

Die zweite Veranstaltung im Rahmen des Konferenzzyklus „Rethinking Business“ setzt den Fokus auf „Neue Materialien und Individuelle Produktion“ – und schlägt dabei die Brücke von der Vision zur Praxis. Der nach dem Open-Source-Modell „fab@home“ für 2.000,- Euro gebaute Prototyp eines einfachen 3D-Druckers geht während der Konferenz live in Produktion und vermittelt den Teilnehmern einen Eindruck von den zukünftigen Möglichkeiten einer Fabrik im Taschenformat: Mit einem für Endkunden erschwinglichen 3D-Printer könnte das Ausdrucken von Alltagsprodukten nämlich bald flächendeckend zu Hause möglich sein.

„Uns beschäftigt im Rahmen der Rethinking-Business-Reihe die Frage, wie die Wirtschaft der Zukunft funktioniert. Dieses Mal interessieren wir uns für die Produktwelt. Wir fragen: Wie sehen die Produkte der Zukunft aus? Wie werden sie entwickelt und hergestellt? Und wie müssen sich Unternehmen aufstellen, um intelligente Materialien und individuelle Produktion als Innovationstreiber zu nutzen“, sagt Andreas Neef, geschäftsführender Gesellschafter von Z_punkt.

Darauf muss die Wirtschaft vorbereitet sein – wie einst beim Siegeszug des Personal Computers. Dr. Matthias Lüken, Produktentwickler bei Henkel, und Dr. Sigurd Buchholz, Technologieexperte bei der Bayer Technology Services GmbH, berichten aus der Industrieperspektive über Anwendungsmöglichkeiten und Innovationspotenziale einer individualisierten Produktionsweise.

Weitere Infos:
Rethinking Business #02. Produkte von morgen

22 Nov 2007, 16:00 - 21:30 Uhr at Zollverein School of Management & Design, Essen

http://www.rethinkingbusiness.de

Programm-Flyer und Anmeldung online (Studenten können für nur 50 Euro teilnehmen !)

Info: Silke Schneider (schneider@z-punkt.de)

Open Innovation Widget -- Fellowforce creates open line between users and companies

As of today organizations can integrate an widget into their websites to enable consumer-generated innovation, a solution to solicit ideas, suggestions and innovation proposals.

The widget has been developed by FellowForce. Their founder and Head of Marketing, Ruben Robert, will be a presenter at the MCPC 2007 conference.

In a press announcement, Jeff Crites from Fellowforce North America explains:

"We started our platform for Open Innovation two months ago, and since then we've received ideas and suggestions for leading brands worldwide. The idea for this new service is due in large part to a submission in our own innovation box. A Fellowforce 'Fellow', Marcel Heinkens of the Netherlands, suggested we offer an Open Innovation widget for websites. Today, four weeks later, we're introducing the 'Innovate Us' button, enabling any business to welcome ideas from a global force of innovators".

The 'Innovate Us' button is like a 'Digg-this' application for innovation, empowering and encouraging consumers to submit ideas to company controlled (Fellowforce enabled) innovation boxes. "We prefer to call them Innovation Boxes because consumer participation is more than just a feedback tool", adds Crites, "it's a driver for innovation. And for companies, this is like having a souped-up RSS aggregator to manage idea feeds."

What is the effect of such a widget?

Well, I think it is not largest innovation of innovation. But it is a great signal that companies are taking their users more and more seriously. Companies are making a statement that they believe in open innovation and value ideas from the outside. And I am curious to hear on Ruben's MCPC 2007 presentation how this will
work out.

Context: Have a look in the updated MCPC 2007 program to find more then 20 other presentations on open innovation: http://www.mcpc07.com/draft_program_MCPC2007.pdf

Bikers Want Customized Motorcycle Seats, Custom Fit Study Finds

Motorcyclists are in favor of customizing their motorcycle seats according to their body geometry. A survey on customization of motorcycle seats carried out as part of the European funded project Custom-Fit, found that 81% of the survey respondents support the idea of a customized seat.

The Custom-Fit project is investigating new techniques for customizing a product based on Rapid Manufacturing (RM). The project is supported with almost 10 millions Euro by the European Community and is one of the largest projects in the area of customization (Disclosure: I am a member of the project’s scientific advisory board).

As explained in the previous posting, RM allows parts to be manufactured directly and automatically using 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model. The new technique will enable consumers to buy products that are built to the exact requirements of the consumers. A motorcycle customized according to body geometry is one of the products which the project is investigating. Other possible applications of the new technique include prosthetic sockets, helmets, mandible implants and knee implants.

The survey was recently carried out by Loughborough University in UK, who is a partner in the project, and received 3200 responses from motorcyclists worldwide. In the survey, majority of the respondents owned a motorcycle and do not share their motorcycle with another person. Although only half of the respondents said that they had experience of discomfort from their motorcycle seats, but majority felt the discomfort during long distance travelling. In addition, more than half of the respondents are willing to pay a premium for the customized seat and many were willing to wait longer.

Professor Richard Hague, Head of the Rapid Manufacturing Research Group in Loughborough University, said: “These initial results show that there is wide support for customised goods – even if initially they are more expensive and take longer to produce.” (Note: Richard Hague chairs the Rapid Manufacturing Track at the MCPC 2007 conference!)

The next phase in the project will be to investigate the technical practicality of designing a motorcycle seat based on the scan data of the consumer’s body profile. Research on how to obtain the body geometry has already started and the project is is now working on defining a “comfort map”, which is a combination of the pressure map and the discomfort zones.

This result is used to identify the area on the seat which needs to be redesigned and the new seats will be testes on motorcycles. At the same time, the management issues involved in providing a customization service for motorcycle seats have also been studied. The project has identified the possible ways to offer the service to the consumers and is studying the supply chain implications of introducing such a service.

Context:

- More results from the Custom Fit project will be presented in several talks on the MCPC 2007 @ MIT !

- Custom-Fit is an industry led project to investigate the possibility of moving towards knowledge based manufacturing and customized production through integration of knowledge in Rapid Manufacturing, Information Technology and Material Science. Funded under the Sixth Framework Program, the project involves 33 partners from around Europe. The aim is to create a fully integrated system for the design, production and supply of individualized products. It has targeted product for implementing the new technology, including motorcycle seats, helmets, implants and prosthesis. Project homepage: http://www.custom-fit.org/

Rapid Manufacturing for Mass Customization: Good Report in DESIGN NEWS Analyzes Recent Development

Joseph Ogando, Senior Editor of DESIGN NEWS, a trade publication, recently published a great feature article on “ Rapid Manufacturing's Role in the Factory of the Future”.

It reports on the use of laser sintering and similar direct manufacturing technologies not just to make prototypes but also to turn out production parts. It’s a practice that goes by many names — including rapid manufacturing, direct digital manufacturing, solid freeform fabrication and low-volume-layered manufacturing. All of the names refer to the use of additive fabrication technologies, which were initially intended for prototyping, to make finished goods, instead. Rapid manufacturing is considered to be one of the main enablers of mass customization of the future.

The report has a number of nice case studies and analyzes the main challenges or rapid manufacturing:

The biggest barrier in the coming years is seen with regard to materials. Some additive parts simply don’t measure up to their molded, machined and cast counterparts when it comes to tensile and other mechanical properties. … Another material issue involves freedom of choice. With additive technologies, engineers currently have to settle for a limited materials line-up. But as the article shows, the scope of applicable materials is fast growing.

A second barrier is seen in the persistent lack of design data. “it’s not so much that current prototyping materials have some shortcomings as the fact engineers have no way of knowing exactly what those shortcomings are.” The article cites a lack of long-term creep and environmental data for additive plastic parts and fatigue data for metals as the most glaring examples of this data deficiency. But rapid manufacturing observers expect more and more data will become available as direct digital manufacturing becomes more popular. In the meantime, large OEMs with stringent manufacturing requirements have worked to develop their own property data.

A third barrier quoted in the report are the capabilities of the existing machinery. Making good production parts every day ups the ante on process repeatability, quality control, throughput and reliability. “Today’s additive fabrication systems aren’t completely ready for prime time. They’re still primarily prototyping machines that you can coax into working as manufacturing systems”´, an industry expert is quoted in the report.

But despite these limitations, the article comes to a positive conclusion:

“With all these factors weighing against direct digital manufacturing, you might wonder, why bother? But, these additive systems already offer design benefits that can offset their manufacturing limitations.

For one, additive machines can produce complex part geometries without regard to conventional manufacturing limitations. Additive fabrication methods based on powder metal beds, for example, can enable parts with interior cavities and features that could not be machined or cast — at least not in an economical one-piece part. ... The upshot of all this design freedom, and the benefit most cited by advocates of direct digital manufacturing, is parts consolidation.

How long will it take for engineers to recognize the design benefits associated with additive processes? Todd Grimm, a consultant to the rapid prototyping industry, thinks it could take 10 or even 20 more years given the current lack of familiarity with additive machines and the technical barriers associated with the machines themselves. …

For a handful of applications, though, the future is now. The best known and highest volume direct digital manufacturing niche has, so far, involved applications where mass customization plays a role. 3D Systems’ Reichental points to the hearing aids as one example and also says RM machines have seen use in the production of casting tools for Invisalign braces. And as the additive machines in general become more capable, … they’ll play a stronger role in other kinds of customized medical and dental devices whose geometry is tailored to the requirements of individual patients.”

Context:
- Read the full article here: Joseph Ogando, Rapid Manufacturing's Role in the Factory of the Future, Design News´, 26 July 2007

- Other reports on rapid manufacturing in this blog.

- Browse the program of the MCPC 2007 to explore talks and presentations on rapid manufacturing during the conference.

Report on State of Mass Customization Implementation and Cost Drivers

Only 67% of BTO/ETO manufacturers know how much it costs to produce customized products, and 73% don't know the cost of engineering change orders

A new report on mass customization and build-to-order manufacturing has recently been published by Cincom Systems, a manufacturer of configuration and quote-to-order solutions. The study is based on 72 interviews with senior engineering managers at manufacturers of complex industrial, electrical, and transportation equipment and systems between January and February 2007.

While such an industry-driven report is biased by the perspective if its sponsor (and also its interview base is pretty small and probably not representative), the study contains a number of interesting data which, from my experience, represent the state of many companies offering customized industrial products (b-to-b).

The report found that only 67% of build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers know how much it costs to produce customized products, and 73% don't know the cost of engineering change orders. Only 27% had figured out the cost of engineering change orders. But despite the lack of cost information, more than half of the survey respondents believe that they have the ability to charge a 10-25% or higher premium with a product customization strategy.

Customization rates will increase in the future

The disconnect between pricing assumptions surrounding product customization and traceable costs becomes a barrier to sustaining momentum with mass customization strategies into the future. This is especially true as the broad majority of managers interviewed by Cincom for this report state that requests for customized products have been increasing over the last five years, and 26% anticipate that the growth rate will be between 25% and 50% in the next two years. Managers quote the following corporate objectives which are driving customization efforts (in ranked order of importance): (i) Meet specific customer requirements, (ii) Demonstrate product leadership, (iii) Improve positioning against lower-cost competitors, (iv) Improve internal efficiencies, and (v) Enhance margins or price premiums.

Some other key findings, as quoted from the report:

“Product customization strategies are predominantly relied on by manufacturers to both increase production efficiencies at the low end of their product lines and drive up premium pricing at the high end. 73% of total respondents see product customization as critical for products over $100,000; 25% also see them as critical for products under $1,000.

There is a significant knowledge gap between what engineering needs to contribute to a mass customization strategy and what existing systems are delivering. While only 50% of respondents use any type of software for managing the product customization processes, 56% do not have service information, 55% do not have catalog and selling information, and 50% do not have product development information critical to support product customization.

One of the greatest risks to mass customization is the intensive amount of intellectual capital that engineers have, yet it is not captured anywhere (64%). Additionally, 35% of respondents report that there is no method in place for sharing knowledge throughout the company.”

Automated Product Configuration

The study asked managers about the tools they use to support mass customization. Not surprisingly, CAD is the primary tool used to support the customization process (92%). The implication is that the customization process is primarily drawing-driven based on tribal knowledge with heavy engineering involvement in the specification process. Beyond the CAD system, most manufacturers are using ad hoc technologies such as spreadsheets (51%) or manual processes supported by documentation (41%) to support the customization process. Few companies utilize automated configuration systems. Of those who do, 30% use homegrown systems and only 24% use third-party packages.

These numbers indicate that there is rather little integration of tools within the customization process, and the level of integration decreases significantly as you move from manufacturing (ERP at 30%) through engineering (CAD at 24%) into the sales channel (Selling Systems at 14%). The lack of integration implies that there is a significant amount of manual intervention within the customization process requiring time and resources, and leaving opportunity for errors.

Barriers to Mass Customization

According to the study, most engineers believe that product complexity is not the primary barrier to customization. They cite lack of knowledge of options by the customer (67%) as the primary barrier to customization efforts. The implication is that the knowledge required to effectively sell customized products is not being effectively transferred to the customer. This is not surprising given the often technology-focused implementation of configuration systems. There are huge opportunities for improvement in sales and operational effectiveness to be gained by addressing this issue. Of the surveyed respondents, 43% indicated that inadequate systems are also a barrier to customization.

As written before, these numbers and findings have to be interpreted from the perspective of its originator: a company selling exactly those systems to improve the gaps identified in the survey. But despite all sales buzz, the study shows that many companies still have a long way to go to change their (craft) engineer-to-order systems to true mass customization operations.

Context:
Download the report.

A special issue of the IJMassC (4/2006) has a number of case studies that demonstrate how MC pioneers closed these gaps. Read especially the paper by Lars Hvam on the configuration system of APC, a provider of data center equipment.

I am the cover star of the latest WIRED issue (and you can be it, too)

New York Times reporter Claudia Deutsch yesterday had a very nice article about the latest WIRED magazine issue. This issue’s cover story is about the growing personalization trend. And to illustrate this trend, subscribers could upload a picture in the last week to the WIRED website which was then digitally printed on their individual issue. A great way to impress your mother in law and get your 15 minutes of fame.

The project was enabled in a cooperation with Xerox who also want to promote their capabilities of high-speed, large volume custom printing (using their iGen3 110 digital production press). There have been many attempts to customize papers and journals according to a user’s individual profile, but that you could appear on the cover of a major national magazine is a new thing.

The NYT article reports about the cooperation between the two companies and has some more information about the production process of the personal cover. And in case you missed this, on the WIRED website, you can still create your custom WIRED cover, but this time in digital form (and their toolkit really is bad, a shame for a technology magazine).

How mass customization really works -- Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt has a nice video on their blog that shows how a custom product really is made. You would expect a lot of high tech machines .. but the secret are many many hands and human labor ... given this complexity and the German wage level, it is amazing that the custom t-shirts do not cost more (but perhaps workers are just paid in t-shirts).

Or, as the company's founder writes:

"When people visit one of Spreadshirts manufacturing sites, they are often surprised. they expected a big machine, somebody pressing a few buttons and a customized shirts to emerge. instead they find real manufacturing. real people taking real apparel from shelves (hard till impossible to replace with robots at a competitive price with nowadays tech), real people preparing the designs, real people pressing the shirts, real people doing quality control and packaging."

Here is the video about the reality behind one of the largest mass customization consumer sites (show this video to your local government funding agency, and they will provide you money as this shows the labor effects of a mass customizer in town)):

Link: sevenload.com

CNN on User Manufacturing and Fabbing Your Products at Home

Dean Irvine from CNN Online reports in a recent article on a new project, Fab@Home, that wants to provide a machine that can make anything, even itself -- and this in the comfort of your home. What sounds like the dream of a science fiction author is a device developed at Cornell University by Hod Lipson, Assistant Professor at Cornell's Computing and Information Science department, and Evan Malone, a PhD student.

Lipson and Malone's machine is different to conventional rapid manufacturing technologies in several reasons: First, it can use a number of materials, from plastics to metals with a low melting point. "This makes them useful for making parts or components, but not for making complete systems. We're aiming to make integrated systems, including circuitry and sensors," Lipson is quoted in the article.

Second, the machine is not a proprietary technology, but open source machinery.

DIY fabbers have been able to download plans on how to make their own Fab@Home devices from the web site and are able to build it using off-the-shelf components for around $2000, or buy a kit for $3,000. The machines can then be run from software on a desktop computer. Unsurprisingly the current model is more rudimentary than professional rapid prototyping machines.

Lipson: "Since the machine has been out there people have been experimenting with all sorts of materials including food. We've seen a lot of chocolate, cheese and peanut butter-based creations. This might not be the way the machine is used in the future, but it just goes to show how adaptable and open the creative impetus it is."

Lipson thinks that digital fabrication is currently in a similar situation to that of computers in the 1960s, but instead of kits in the hands of enthusiasts and boffins, the fabbing machines can be developed by creatives across the world thanks to the Internet, freeware and open source software.

"It's a project that will be perfected and improved thanks to the online community of designers and creatives. Getting it into the hands of the people is very important. All the software and components are open source so can be changed or modified according to what people want," he said.

While the machine still is in its early stages of development, the article comments on the potential impact of such a machine. This discussion fits into the vision of user manufacturing. In some quotes in the article, I am saying (please excuse this shameless act of self-promotion):

Piller: "It's hard to say if [Fab@home] will be in everyone's home in the next 20 years. It might follow the same trajectory as the laser printer. Who predicted that nearly every home would have one of them 20 years ago? What is certain is that in the long run it's sure to transform the manufacturing process, big companies won't have to focus so much on economies of scale. ... [For consumers], you won't have to wait for products. It will be similar to being your own publisher online, but with an enormous scope of what you can produce."

And how about replicating some Prada shoes or Aquascutum cuff links, Irvin asks in his article. Well, just look on Google Sketch-up and its repository of 3D designs. you will find an amazing number of reverse engineered IKEA furniture here.

"Already people are customizing designs of existing products, like Ikea furniture, using designs tools and these types of machines. It's small scale now, but if this becomes big, then Ikea are going to step in and say:'Hey, you can't customize our designs.' [But] if they're smart then they'll put these machines in their stores," said Piller.

And the basic idea of the IKEA business model of self assembly would become one of self-design (modification) and self production.

Read the full article here: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/04/26/fs.fabmachine/

Context: - The CNN article refers to a fabbed ladies shoe that is wrongly credited to my group. I wrote about the first laser sintered shoe in this blog, but its inventors and designers are Marc van der Zande from TNO Science and Industry and Sjors Bergmans from Concept Design who developed the shoe in a joint EU-funded project called CEC-made shoes.
- Another nice article about the project.

Recent Partnerships and Acquisitions Provide New Infrastructure For Launching Instant Mass Customization Offerings

It gets easier and easier to open an instant mass customization company. You have a great idea or design that you want to offer customized? But you do not want to mess up with manufacturing, fulfillment, or building a configurator? You are either a large existing brand, mass producer, or an individual consumer?

Never mind, a new bunch of mass customization enablers is helping you to set up instantly a mass customization value chain from design to delivery with a few clicks. Well, this is at least the promise of a number of mass customization enablers that can change the mass customization game.

A partnership by DemandMade with Exclusive Pro and the acquisition of Confego by Zazzle (see the previous two postings) have created integrated mass customization fulfillment systems in the US that can be utilized easily to open a MC or personalization business. Leipzig, Germany, based Spreadshirt offers a similar integrated value chain for the custom apparel business, with a smaller solution space, but an even easier interface to create your own mass customization business.

Years earlier, Germany based Human Solutions already have provided a similar integrated supply chain for custom garments including also custom fit and mass-bespoke tailoring. Their system, however, was based on more formal contracts and a traditional franchise system. It was not as easy to set up as your own customization web store at Spreadshirt or Zazzle.

I am curious to see how these ventures will play off and what kind of services will be enabled in the future. It never has been easier to open a mass customization business … what is happening here is the creation of a common infrastructure, think of a mass customization operation system that enables instant companies and user manufacturing in these domains.

So use these capabilities to create your custom world.

Context:
- Mass Customization Enablers I: Zazzle Acquires Confego to Move the Company beyond BtoC Customization Business
- Mass Customization Enablers II: DemandMade & Exclusive Pro Create Partnership to Deliver a Complete Custom Apparel Solution for Online Retailers
- User Manufacturing: The trend and developments

Mass Customization Enablers I: Zazzle Acquires Confego to Move the Company beyond BtoC Customization Business

When Brennan Mulligan, founder of Confego, told me that he sold his company to Zazzle, this transaction made a lot of sense for me. With Confego, Brennan had helped other companies like Nike, Rebook, or Timberland, to open mass customization businesses, based on the experiences he gained by working at Timbuk2, the messenger bag customizer, going into business more than 12 years ago (Timbuk2 was founded by Rob Honeycutt).

Confego, a San Francisco Bay Area-based company, has helped in the past years large retail brands to offer customizable versions of their products. The company's primary role is to build and maintain supply chains that are optimized to source customized products quickly and efficiently. While Confego also provided a proprietary, web-based order management software to link contract factories directly to client web sites and other points of purchase, their special focus was more like a boutique consulting firm, helping big brands to understand mass customization in lager detail.

And Zazzle? Like Cafepress or Spreadshirt, at Zazzle http://www.zazzle.com anyone can create and share one-of-a-kind products like apparel, posters, and greeting cards. Zazzle combines on-demand manufacturing, an online community, a huge collection of customizable digital images and different toolkits to empower consumers to create their products. In addition, individuals can choose to become contributors by sharing their unique creations in Zazzle's public galleries. Within these galleries, anyone can browse, comment and connect with others who share their interests. Contributors also earn royalties every time their creations are purchased by others.

So how can this consumer playground ( “Internet's Creativity Marketplace(TM)” is Zazzle’s claim) match to Confego’s boutique BtoB focus? Well, the core of both companies was to enable others to sell custom products, either brands or individual users. And both companies did utilize existing brands: Confego helped large mass production brands to go customization. Zazzle played with brands twofold: First, they used big entertainment brands as part of their merchandising strategy to offer branded images of cartoon characters, movies, etc. Secondly, they created the user brands: Create your stuff, name it, and sell it to everyone.

The Confego acquisition by Zazzle now combines these areas. As a result, Zazzle arrives as a great enabler of customized brands, on the retail, consumer, and merchandising level. And so the press announcement is full of joy:

"This relationship marks the beginning of a new generation of customization for Zazzle," said Robert Beaver, CEO and co-founder of Zazzle.com. "New brand partnerships mean new choices for our customers who are always looking for better means of self expression."

"The creativity of the Zazzle community is a perfect fit with our current offerings," said Brennan Mulligan. "Consumers have come to expect more for their money. The growing availability of fast, easy and affordable customization is empowering shoppers to get exactly what they want, without being force-fed what designers are offering."

And Zazzle gained more: Confego co-founders Brennan Mulligan and David Gross will become part of the Zazzle team. As a pioneer in the field of customization, Mulligan will help Zazzle achieve limitless customization that provides consumers a unique finished product almost immediately and at an affordable price. Confego has perfected the manufacturing and fulfillment process, allowing delivery of custom shoes in just one week, as opposed to the three to five week lead time currently provided from similar vendors. Confego also brings expertise in the customization of the construction of products, including cut, color, fabric choice and custom embroidery.

Guest Article: Market Relevancy for 21st Century Manufacturers -- Connecting Your Customers to Your Enterprise

In this guest article, Dave Gardner, a long time mass customization veteran, comments on how companies can become a “progressive manufacturer” by moving towards mass customization.

David J. Gardner is the Founder and Principal of mass-customization-expert, a consultancy helping companies in the design and integration of innovative business process and information technology solutions for companies. He has held management positions in Engineering, Manufacturing, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service, and Product Management. He joined Tandem Computers in 1979 where he was responsible for Corporate Documentation Standards for Tandem's highly configurable and expandable computer systems. In 1983, he designed and implemented a Configuration Guide for Dialogic Systems instituting a process that greatly simplified a complex, modular product such that the field sales organization and international OEM customers could easily define their order requirements. David improved the approach at System Industries in the late 1980’s by developing a methodology that not only accommodated "new system" orders but also fully addressed "add-on" orders. In 1991, he founded his consulting company. In July 2002, David was recruited by E-ONE, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of fire and rescue vehicles, as Vice President of Product Management to lead an enterprise-wide change initiative to transition the company from an “engineer-to-order” to a “mass customization” business paradigm. He is a graduate of San Jose State University (BA) and Santa Clara University (MBA).

Market Relevancy for 21st Century Manufacturers -- Connecting Your Customers to Your Enterprise

In an ideal world, manufacturing executives would:

1) Carefully consider the over-arching business and operational strategies needed to create a truly compelling, differentiated business in their marketplace, and,

2) Select the business software applications.

How many companies start with Step 2? The vast majority! Why?

A manufacturing executives’ spotlight is usually aimed at the product and marketplace, not operational details unless there’s been a serious breakdown in the operational side of the business. Let’s face it—it’s hard to get executives excited about a new business application system.

When was the last time an executive from a manufacturing company exclaimed, “Our new ERP system is a true source of competitive advantage and differentiation in our market?” While it may be true that there are genuine business execution issues that arise from a poorly implemented, poorly architected, or an inappropriate ERP system, ERP by itself is not a source of competitive advantage. ERP is essentially a “back-office” tool.

The biggest question about new business systems is typically “how much is it going to cost and how long is it going to take?”

Last year, Managing Automation hosted the Progressive Manufacturing Summit 2006. David Brousell, Editor-in-Chief of Managing Automation, delivered an address “7 Rules to Win in a Global Market.” In his presentation, David defined the global manufacturing winners as “Progressive Manufacturers,” offering the following definition:

Progressive Manufacturers infuse technology into all areas of their business to create sustainable competitive advantage by connecting the customer to the manufacturing process.

This definition is powerful and compelling and should be the rallying cry behind all operational and information technology initiatives. Let’s break this down.

My first observation about the notion of being a “progressive manufacturer” is the holistic or seamless nature from a customer’s perspective. As a customer (or a prospective customer), wouldn’t you prefer to deal with a “progressive manufacturer” as it is defined above?

“Connecting the customer to the manufacturing process” implies that a company is customer-driven—the company, its business process and information technologies are seamlessly designed with the customer in mind and offer the customer the means to interact directly with the company. What might this mean?

- Being able to determine order status (in order administration, production control, production line, shipping, etc.)
- Being able to determine in-transit status
- Being able to look at financial issues (open invoices, paid invoices, etc.)

For companies that offer configurable products, “connecting the customer to the manufacturing process” suggests:

Being able to make decisions about the product or order configuration
Being able to understand the configuration possibilities, pricing and estimated lead time based on actual order configuration

“Sustainable” implies a continual state of evolution—that a company is constantly enhancing its ability to maintain its relevancy and value provided to the customer. There is no such thing as steady state or time-out. It is said in nature that there is no “steady state”—something is either growing or dying. The same can be said for manufacturing companies. Progressive companies enjoy no extended periods of relaxation.

“Competitive advantage” suggests you are doing things that you competitors are not. Generally, this would imply innovation either in technology, process or the way in which you delight the customer. If everybody else in your industry is doing exactly the same thing, how can a company expect to enjoy competitive advantage?” The other added benefit of seeking competitive advantage is it catches competitors by surprise and can take years for them to catch up. This is a stealth approach at its best.

Are there any companies that meet the criteria of being a “progressive manufacturer?” Dell is one of the best examples I can think of. I’m certain Cisco Systems is another. In reality, the number of manufacturers you could classify as “progressive” is probably quite small. That bodes well for companies seeking to differentiate themselves in their market.

Let’s circle back around to our original proposition:

In an ideal world, manufacturing executives would carefully consider the over-arching business and operational strategies needed to create a truly compelling, differentiated business in their marketplace.

A company seeking to become a “progressive manufacturer” has the opportunity to start with the objective of “infusing technology into all areas of their business to create sustainable competitive advantage by connecting the customer to the manufacturing process.”

This requires a holistic view of where you want to go as a business. It doesn’t make sense to select one or more applications in isolation of the total solution and hope that you can “connect the dots” later. It’s no different than having an architect design a house. You really can’t architect and build at the same time. However, once the architecture is complete, you can build away.

It’s best to fully understand and agree what the target is to ensure you end up becoming the “progressive manufacturer” David Brousell characterizes in his speech. Getting outside assistance with this is one way to ensure you don’t, as well-know author and consultant Alan Weiss often says, “breathe your own exhaust.” Once you have a comprehensive, coherent vision, you can then begin to assemble the pieces of the solution. To do otherwise, is to open the door to a less than satisfactory solution.

Contact Dave Gardner at
djg@mass-customization-expert.com
www.mass-customization-expert.com
USA/Canada: +1.888.488.4976
International: +1.775.722.8230

Personalization in Health, Food, and Pharma

IEEE Workshop on Personalized Health Informatics in London, UK January 24-25, 2007

One of the major fields of growth in mass customization & personalization is the health sector. The traditional system is focused on "block buster" pharmaceuticals (= standard mass products) and the care-taking of "illnesses". A new approach is to personalize medicines (pharma-cogenetics) and to develop customized nutrition, wellness offerings, and fitness / training programs to match individual requirements.

During the upcoming MCPC 2007 conference, Personalization in Health, Food, and Pharma will be a special track !

The IEEE, a main standardization body, has now initiated a new working group to develop an comprehensive set of solutions for that shall "facilitate the development and usage of a comprehensive set of Internet-based tools that place the individual (and his/her dependents) at the center of an encompassing architecture of services that promote and enhance health."

Thanks to MadeforOne.com I learned about this group. I think that this kind of joint collaborative activities are what it needs to push mass customization further.

Jose C. Lacal, one of the group co-chairs and a Sr.Manager at Motorola's Seamless Health Center of Excellence, described the objectives of the group as follows:

"There is a need for Personalized Health Informatics (PHI) systems to manage all the relationships that influence an individual's health. This standard is geared towards optimizing an individual's health, mostly outside of the scope of a health care provider. This standard is not about personal health records (that is being address already by many other organizations). This proposal is to create a "family health dashboard" where all relevant information (nutrition, environmental issues, published research, etc.) are brought together in an easy-to-use tool to enhance a family's health. Most people would be familiar with a 'financial dashboard.'

There is an open call for participation at the first workshop of the IEEEP2407 working group. At a time when health delivery systems worldwide are under enormous strain, IEEE2407 is designed to provide consumers with the tools to both stay healthy and to improve their health.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday and Thursday, January 24 and 25, 2007 in London, UK. The workshop will be hosted by Motorola and Kingston University's Mobile Information and Network Technologies Research Centre (MINT@K).

The latest agenda is available at http://www.ieee2407.org/files//ws01_agenda.pdf

More information at http://www.ieee2407.org/ws01.html. For those unable to attend, a conference telephone bridge will be provided via e-mail once you register.

Adidas Finally Adds Experiment & Service to its Mi Adidas Product – New mi Adidas Innovation Center Opened in Paris

I recently wrote about the opportunities of bringing mass customization into stores and selling the experience as much as the custom product (see the DNA Style Lab posting). Now Adidas, a premier example of mass customization in my talks and lectures, has expanded its in-store presence with a huge new mi Adidas retail outlet in its new Paris flagship store.

The 1,750 square meter Paris adidas Sport Performance store occupies two floors on the Avenue de Champs Elysees and features a wide selection of adidas products. The core part of this store is a pimped mi-adidas sales system, called mi Innovation Center (mIC):

"The "mi Innovation Center" will change the way consumers shop and their expectations at retail. It is a true first and we are thrilled to premier the mIC in Paris offering customers a whole new dimension of interaction with adidas products," Karen Feldpausch-Sturm, Senior Vice President of Global Retail for Adidas, is quoted in a press announcement. Adidas, headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, plans to roll out the new high-tech concept stores in major cities worldwide, including one in China in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Features of the new customization unit in the mIC include:

# A large glossy, black cube is the focal point of the center. Here, customers can customize their own "mi adidas", using now a larger flat-screen configurator to alter the details of the shoes by simply pointing a finger to the screen. Laser and infra-red technology then translate the gestures into commands. Foot scanning and pressure scanning is done as in the mi adidas stores before.

# New is also a virtual mirror where users can see their personalized shoe on their own foot without even removing ones shoes!

# But customization is not only high-tech: Customers are accompanied by specially trained "adidas experts" who, like a personal trainer, advise on nutrition, exercise and products. With a portable hand-held PC, the sales associates record a consumer's personal data and desires, creating a user profile that he/she can view at their convenience via the internet.

# In addition to the cube, the center also provides some insight into new approaches of selling standard products: At a table, a sliding carriage can be moved over a desired shoe and then specific product information will appear on the screen via Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.

Update: On YouTube is now a Video showing exactly the new mi adidas customization process (thanks to Rebang for the link).

I don't had the opportunity to visit this store in person, but a sneaker enthusiast posted a nice review on the BKRW blog (the reviewer seemed to have not heard before that Adidas is offering basically the same service since 2001, thus not in such a fancy retail outlet):

"Well, to be honest we were really impressed and can't wait to test it for real (don't worry we will be in the first row…) ! The concept is really simple, it's a kind of NIKE ID applied to performance shoes. It means that you can customize our own performance shoes, according to the way u need it. You can change the design, change the colors, add some words or some special tags, but most of all you can even materials of the shoes : sole, mid-sole, chassis, uppers, studs… The truth is that ADIDAS is pushing the whole performance concept with the even way of customizing your shoes, because even being in MI INNOVATION CENTER is a travel into the future: as we said you are running on a video carpet, each salesman has a touch screen tablet to change into real time your adjustments and preferences, while you are directing your mouse on the menu screen by the means of a laser system of pointing…"

Is all this just another marketing gimmick?, asks Business Week in a report about this store.

My answer is yes and no. Regarding customization of the product, it is just a pimped up version of the mi adidas retail units that are in place since years. But regarding the overall strategy of customization, it is a large step forward. For the first time, the company is not focusing on the custom product, but on the custom service and experience users get when purchasing the shoe. The custom nutrition program and fitness guides offer much more value as yet-an-other color-option at NikeID. So while Nike had an easy win with the Ipod-Nike-combination offering individual tracking of your running behavior, I think Adidas has beaten its competition with this integration retail innovation by far – if they are able to scale up this system and deliver what they promise.

Business Week quotes Fiona Fairhurst, director of Zero Point Zero One, a sports consultancy in Nottinghamshire, England, on this:

"These days if you look around the gym, everyone is their own fitness expert. People know how to use heart-rate monitors and measure their own level of hydration …An individual will steer clear of a brand that doesn't fit properly, no matter how exclusive that brand is. If you know that Adidas fits you perfectly and comfortably then they have a customer for life."

MCPC 2007: How you can participate at THE mass customization event of 2007

Call for Papers and Pre-Announcements of the 2007 World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization

Finally, more information about the MCPC 2007. The most important message of this long posting: Save your time and travel budget for Oct 7-12, 2007! At this time, the next World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization (MCPC) will take place at MIT in Boston and HEC in Montreal – and it will become THE event of the MC event circuit.

We are in the moment in the heavy planning stage of the event here at MIT, but I want to share some more information here so that you can start thinking what YOU want to present on the MCPC!

The event: The biannual World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization (MCPC) is the premier event for the Mass Customization community. Bridging academic research and management practice, the conference provides an interactive and interdisciplinary platform to share ideas about mass customization strategies and to discuss the latest technologies and enablers.

Download MCPC 2007 Flyer

In October 2007, the MCPC will include two parts:

Part 1, Oct 7-10, 2007: MCP Research & Innovation Conference. Hosted by the MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge/Boston (USA) with an interdisciplinary focus on the new advancements in the field.

The MCP Research & Innovation Conference is designed to engage academics, business leaders and consultants in fundamental debates through a set of plenary presentations, discussion panels, and paper presentations. In addition to the traditional functional conference streams of the MCPC conferences, we especially welcome submissions from managers and consultants reflecting upon the conference theme.

Part 2, Oct 11-12, 2007: MCP Business Seminar hosted by HEC (Haute Études Commerciales) Business School in Montreal (Canada), with a focus on applying mass customization & personalization in a retail setting.

The MCP Business Seminar wants to provide managers a practice-orientated, focused overview on mass customization applications and best practices. The 2007 topic is the application of customization & personalization in retail – leading to a total makeover of retail!

2007 Conference Theme: The objective of the MCPC 2007 is to extend the dialogue beyond today's boundaries and to explore the future of MCP. The theme "Extreme Customization" asks for leading-edge examples of customization, non-traditional and emerging new concepts of personalization. For the technology community, we attempt to identify critical research issues and technological challenges with a rigorous methodology.

Our manifesto is to shift the mass customization debate from a physical product perspective to a total life cycle experience. Mass customization should be more than just configuring a piece of hardware, but should be seen as the co-design of an entire system, including services, experiences and human satisfaction at the individual as well as at the community level.

Continuing the established MCPC tradition, we invite contributions from a wide range of specialists in the engineering and management community including architecture, industrial design, or visual arts, to participate in the larger debate of customization. Mass customization studios, a co-creation challenge, and several focused workshops will elevate the quality of exchange during the conference.

Questions for Discussion in the MCPC 2007. To start the discussion, here are some initial themes and related questions. We encourage participants and authors to engage in these questions and to bring forth their experiences from an interdisciplinary and cross-functional perspective.

System thinking and architectures

How can we design system architectures, extending the discussion of product families?
How can we define ecosystems for mass customization which span the entire product life cycle?
How does system thinking in MCP enable firms to search for new and underutilized opportunities?
What new kinds of capabilities do we need to produce, sell, and maintain MCP systems?

Business models for mass customization

How do we have to adapt, modify or expand established models in marketing and operations management to cover the new debate on mass customization? When do we need new models?
What are the different business models for mass customization? What are the contingency factors describing the preference for such a strategy?
Have we fully utilized postponement strategies for MCP?

Product versus service customization

What is mass customization of service? How is this different from product customization?
What are successful examples of service mass customization which go beyond the conventional, e.g., self-service kiosks?
What are the features of configuration toolkits for service customization?
What are efficient production systems for service customization?

Adaptability: feature or substitute

Adaptability, i.e. built-in flexibility embedded in a product, can both substitute customization delivered by flexible manufacturing or supplement the inherent flexibility of a customized product. How can we develop adaptable systems along the entire life cycle of a product-service-system?
How can we make products more adaptable ("hackable") so that users can adapt them?
What are the economies of adaptability? How to balance the trade-off between performance (cost) and adaptable capabilities?
How to design usable interfaces to utilize a product's adaptable features?

Individual versus community

What is the role of communities for mass customization?
Is personalization exclusive or non-exclusive of shared experiences?
How do online and offline communities effect customization (e.g., by setting trends, helping each other with the configuration, etc.)?
How do communities develop new mass customization offerings?

Emotion, experiences and happiness

Can you mass customize for emotions? How can we capture emotions in product-service-systems?
How does research on emotions help to build better products and services?
What is the premium customers are willing to pay for different experiences along the segments of the MCP product life cycle (e.g., willingness to pay for configuration, co-design, status, custom utility, adaptability, etc.)?
Does mass customization provide "happiness" to consumers (and what is happiness anyway)?

Choice, complexity and simplicity

What is meaningful customization? What are the rules for simplicity in MCP?
Do people want choice? How much is too much?
How can we support users to navigate a solution space?
How do we foster and utilize the creativity of users and customers?

Configuration system and rule sets

How can we change configurators from focusing on constraints and rules to fostering creativity and co-creation?
How can we expand user interfaces with more tangible and intuitive features?
How can we develop embedded configurators?
How can we substitute the pain of customization for the sales force by building integrated sales systems for customization, including the knowledge, tools, and attitudes for efficient customization?

Rapid manufacturing and personal fabricators

What is the state of innovative manufacturing concepts allowing flexibility with no cost penalty?
Where is mass customization manufacturing located (distributed versus centralized)?
Is rapid manufacturing here (to stay)? Is rapid prototyping becoming obsolete?
Are there alternative approaches for efficient flexible manufacturing?

Contradictions in mass customization

What is the relationship of simplicity to complexity in MCP?
What is the tipping point between standardization and customization?
What is the range between user innovation and custom configuration? When, and to which extent, do users customize and manufacture in their own domain and with their own means?
What is the relation of constraints in manufacturing (switching costs) to constraints coming from the entire environment (e.g., health and safety, branding, IP …)?
Are all customers suited for mass customization? Is mass customization suited for any business?

Profits, benefits, and value

What is the benefit and value of MCP? How does this benefit translate to value for individual stakeholders (customers, manufacturer, or retailers)? How can we capture this value from the perspective of an entire system?
How do we measure the value of personalization and customization?

Education & capabilities for MCP

How do we educate students in mass customization? How do we integrate mass customization thinking in established curricula (in a meaningful way)? (See also the call for teaching case studies below.)
How do we build the qualifications and capabilities demanded for mass customization in companies?
How can managers (and educators) unlearn conventional thinking when implementing mass customization?

Mass customization in practice

This track is open for submission of acting managers and entrepreneurs from mass customization and personalization businesses. We ask for presentations which do not focus on presenting just your company or business idea, but on sharing your experiences and success factors of executing mass customization.
Presentation proposals for this track should follow the general guidelines for submission (extended proposal introducing your mass customization offering, the focus of your talk, and some of the key results you plan to present). Proposals should be submitted with the online submission system.

Mass Customization Case Studies (Teaching)

The MCPC 2007 will be followed by a special session in Montreal focused on case studies for mass customization. The idea is to develop material to teach mass customization better.
We invite submissions of case studies dealing with mass customization and personalization. Cases must be original work based on real events, people, and organizations. They must be accompanied by a teaching note and not have been previously published or accepted for publication. The presentation of the cases will be held in Montreal on October 12, 2007. Authors of the best cases will be invited to submit their work to a special issue of the International Journal of Mass Customization or a special issue of the International Journal of Case Studies in Management. Cases should be submitted with the online submission system and authors must follow the MCPC paper submission process and deadlines.

Special Sessions & Themes

Today, there are examples and applications of MCP in all industries and sectors. The MCPC 2007 does not focus on one particular industry, but wants to provide a platform to exchange ideas beyond disciplines and industry borders. We are however especially interested in applications and examples in the following fields where we recently see a lot of interesting momentum in MCP:
- Mass customization, personalization and user innovation in architecture, housing and construction
- Automotive Customization 3.0: Bridging pimped rides with option lists
- Mass customization of services, e.g., in the financial and hospitality industries
- Mass customization of health services & products (pharma-cogenetics)
- Extreme customizing: What can we learn from extreme, leading edge examples of customization and personalization?

Paper Submission Process

We invite you to submit your best work on mass customization and related areas, addressing one or more of the questions asked before. All papers have to be written in English language. We prefer papers which are empirically grounded and go beyond pure conceptual contributions. We are open to a diverse set of quantitative and qualitative methods of empirical research. We especially seek papers which follow the idea of "engaged scholarship", i.e. which are relevant to both practice and research.

You can submit two types of papers (Page limits include references and figures):
Full papers: max. 25 pages (12pt font, double line spacing). Only full papers will be considered for the conference's Best Paper Award.
Extended abstracts for work in progress (about 4-8 pages), but including also comments on the research question, the methodology, data and empirical methods used (if applicable), and a discussion of the results.

The conference proceedings will contain short abstracts of all accepted papers. Authors of accepted papers can decide if they submit a (revised) version of their full paper for publication in the full-text proceedings of the conference, or just a summary version which does not compromise publication of the paper in top journals.

A number of highly respected academic journals expressed already their interest in featuring special issues with selected conference papers after the conference. We will try to facilitate this process for appropriate submissions.

To submit a paper (practitioners: presentation proposal), there will be an online submission system for this conference on the conference web site. Please wait with paper submissions until this system in installed and in place. Do not submit papers per e-mail directly to the conference chairs. All papers will be double-blind reviewed.

Important dates

March 19, 2007: Deadline for submissions
June 1, 2007: Final notification of accepted contributions
Aug. 1, 2007: Author registration deadline
Oct 7-9, 2007: MCP Research & Innovation Conference at MIT
Oct 11-12, 2007: Business Seminar in Montreal, Quebec

Note: ALL presenters and participants, including presenters from companies, have to register for the conference and pay the full registration fee (about 450 USD, 50% discount for students with student ID). There are no exceptions.

MCPC 2007 Program Committee – MIT Research Conference
Conference Chair: William Mitchell, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Conference Program Co-Chairs: Frank Piller, TUM Business School, Technische Universität München, and Mitchell Tseng, Advanced Manufacturing Institute, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Conference Coordinator: Ryan Chin, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MCPC 2007 Program Committee – HEC Montreal Business Seminar
Conference Chair: Jacques Nantel, HEC (Haute Études Commerciales) Business School, Montreal (Canada)
Conference Coordinators: Sylvain Sénécal and Jean-Francois Ouellet, HEC Business School, Montreal

More information:
- Download MCPC 2007 Flyer
- Past conferences: MCPC 2005 (Hong Kong) and MCPC 2003 (Munich)

Footwear Customization 3.0: The First Rapid Manufactured Shoe

Footwear customization brought to a really new level: Today, I had the opportunity to have the world's first working prototype of a totally new shoe concept in my hands: a 100% laser-sintered shoe. What looks like a normal shoe, is a real revolution and one of the largest achievements I have seen in the mass customization world.

The shoe, developed by Marc van der Zande from TNO Science and Industry (a Dutch research institute) and independent designer Sjors Bergmans of Sjors Bergmans Concept Design, comes out of the manufacturing machine as you see it in the pictures on the left – in one manufacturing process, no assembly required (only some finishing, polishing, etc.)! And no one cares any longer if each product is custom or just a replication of a standard design.

The TNO shoe concept, named 'Head over Heels', is the first application of rapid (digital) manufacturing technologies (more about RM) to an entire product in the footwear industry. Such a concept would allow the rapid customization of shoes to a radical extreme – without any of the constraints of conventional custom manufacturing mechanisms like the need for custom lasts, custom cutting of materials, and a new organization of the work process in manufacturing. With rapid manufacturing, a digital design (CAD) can be transformed directly into a tangible product.

In an earlier venture, UK-Based Prior2Lever introduced a soccer boot that contains a rapid manufactured component, the outsole. But the shoe developed by TNO goes much further. To come up with such a concept, the entire design of a shoe had to be redesigned. A flexible element in the sole allows for high flexibility, and integrated elements in the upper are providing flexible hold.

In the moment, this project is in the proof of concept state. According to a colleague who tested the shoes (in the first design just available in a 38 size), they are at least as comfortable as conventionally produced shoes. Future development will include a wider range of models (including a model for men) and an easily scalable design so that in the end a foot scan can automatically be transferred into a custom design. Also, manufacturing costs have to go down. Today, a pair of rapid manufactured shoes comes still with a heavy price tag of 600 Euros. But TNO project manager Marc van der Zande expects that production costs can be dropped to less than 100 Euro within a few years, given the present speed and scope of application of rapid manufacturing technologies in many industries. With this larger scale, materials and machine costs will become much cheaper.

For me, this shoe presentation today was a great glimpse into the future. Just think five years ahead: Then you may really get your feed scanned, and a moment later, your new shoes will be 3D-printed immediately in the store. With this, the long tail of footwear could be driven to an extreme! But most important, the 'Head over Heels' concept provides a strong further proof that digital manufacturing technologies like laser sintering are not just for prototyping any more, but are rapidly becoming a standard manufacturing technology.

More information on the 'Head over Heels' Laser Sintered Shoe:
- For more information on the footwear design, contact Marc van der Zande (marc.vanderzande AT tno.nl) or Sjors Bergmans (comengo AT gmail.com).
- The concept will also be presented on the TNO Symposium on Rapid Manufacturing, Evoluon Conference Center in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Tuesday, Oct 31, 2006.

Context information:
- Jochen Krisch recently had a good overview on companies offering rapid manufacturing capabilities for everyone in his blog.
- John Marshall writes about the older, but still great application of rapid manufacturing for the lamps of the Benelux company Materialise.
- And my own more recent posts on customization of footwear, Open Source Footwear and the interview with Sergio Dulio on latest developments in this area.

Custom Fashion 2.0: How a new Korean project wants to lift mass customization in the apparel business to a new level

On Monday this week, the i-Fashion project was launched in Seoul, Korea. I was invited to speak at the opening event of this interesting initiative. Its objective is to create an entire infrastructure for mass customization in the fashion industry by integrating a number of technologies which today have not been applied in larger scale. Sponsored by the Korean Ministry of Commerce & Energy with about US $7 mil., it combines a consortium of 9 apparel companies and a few technology providers.

As you would expect from a high-tech country like Korea, the exhibition on the opening even was dominated by numerous huge flat panel screens. These screens were, however, no sheer illustration but actual part of a totally new selling process. The entire process builds on virtual models which are generated by a 3D body scan of a consumer. The customer can then create on a touch-screen kiosk her new apparel, including the design of the fabric. Designs are illustrated real-time on the customer's avatar. This avatar and virtual garments shall be also used in mobile applications (where South Korea is famous for) and traditional online shopping environments. Also this idea is not new, but has – to my knowledge – never been integrated in a real shopping infrastructure. One of the project partners, the Hyundai conglomerate, will open a test store in its department store chain already this year.

A co-speaker on an international seminar for this project was Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, a leading expert in virtual modeling and the Director of University of Geneva's MIRALab. I had heard of this lab before, but was astonished to see the scope of its activities. Prof. Magnenat-Thalmann reported from her work as part of the LEAPFROG project, an European project with the objective to modernize and ultimately transform the European clothing sector into a flexible knowledge-driven high-tech industry. Drivers of the project are a radical move towards rapid customized manufacturing through flexiblization and integration of cost-effective and sustainable processes from fabric processing to customer delivery and a new focus on customer service. MIRALab contributed to this project with the development of a 3D virtual try-on platform, including real-time body sizing and cloth simulation.

Projects like i-Fashion and LEAPFROG are very important for the realization of mass customization in the clothing industry as they go beyond automatic pattern generation (based on 3D scans) or flexible manufacturing technologies, but try to create an integrated platform where most of the traditional physical design, manufacturing, and sales processes are shifted to the digital domain.

One of the interesting parts of the project i-Fashion project in this regards is the large scale application of digital-printing for high-end fashion items. This enables the efficient productions of individual patterns and may solve the problem of huge inventories which are required for customization on the component level. i-Fashion Project partner Yuhan-Kimberley demonstrated their latest existing technology during the opening event. I was surprised by the quality of the printing process, but also its speed and cost efficiency (comparable to normal paper photo printing). Also, the garments do not need any further processing or finishing after the printing process. This technology, which shall be improved even further in the project, but first of all integrated in a complete business model, could allow also the legions of custom t-shirt printer a more sustainable production technology compared to today's heat transfer process.

More project info in case you speak Korean: http://textile.konkuk.ac.kr/englishhome/index.html

Or contact the project;s director, Prof. Chang Kyu PARK from the Department of Textile Engineering at Konkuk University, Seoul (cezar@konkuk.ac.kr).

This is so long tail: Newly Launched ZAFU.com Helps Women With Personalized Jeans Recommendations to Find their Perfect Jeans

Personalization as a more scalable alternative to mass customization?

Many women I know share this experience: Looking frustrated at thousands of jeans listed on a search engine, or carrying a pile of denim into a changing room – just still to find not the jean that really fits. ZAFU.com. a new venture by Archetype-Solution's Rob Holloway, wants to provide help – and is the perfect example of an application riding the long tail.

Remember (see post from July 28) that the idea of the now bestselling "The Long Tail" book by Chris Anderson is that today there are (a) unlimited choice and variety, (b) more consumers that want to utilize this variety to find a better fitting product, (c) large profit opportunities for companies not focusing on a few large blockbusters or hit products but on helping customer to explore this variety.

Anderson's book focused on long-tail-applications in the digital sphere, music, books, and movies. But zafu.com brings this into the world of apparel.

CNN described in a press coverage Zafu's concept quite well:

"Sizing jeans to the myriad shapes of women is a challenge even in a department store dressing room, let alone online. Zafu.com, launched this week, arrives as the industry shifts from years of marketing baggy or flare-cut jeans to a skinny silhouette that is much harder to size and wear. "We've taken the trouble to actually measure and check the jean and try it on people to see how it really fits," Chief Executive Rob Holloway told Reuters. "We are the friend in the dressing room, I guess."

Zafu asks women shoppers 11 questions about how they prefer jeans to sit on their hips or waist to create a body profile. That alone is a departure from the incongruous body-type descriptions of "pears" or "triangles" found in fashion magazines and retail catalogues.

The results are used to match the user with as many jeans as could suit them from a database of hundreds of styles, from broadly marketed Gap to pricey Seven, then link them to a retailer to purchase."

In a recent phone conversation with Rob Holloway, he described the laborious process it took them to set up this fit database. They invited hundreds of women in their offices, each woman hat to try on 32 different jeans, all fits being evaluated by the company's own apparel experts. This gave them both information about women's shapes and figures and information about the cuts and fitting secrets of dozens of different jeans brands. To update this information, Zafu has created a streamlined process so that new models can easily being integrated into their database and assortment.

Correct sizing is one of the biggest obstacles to the growth of online apparel and footwear sales, which are expected to rise in the US to $13.8 billion this year from $11.3 billion a year ago, according to tracking firm Shop.org data. Almost 14 billion sounds a lot, but is only 6 percent of total U.S. apparel and related sales.

The jeans market is an interesting market segment. Market research firm NPD Group reports women's jeans sales reached $7.8 billion for the 12 months through March 2006 -- a 10.8% increase over the $7.04 billion reported during the same period a year ago. This data is on top of a 13.7% growth rate of jean sales between 2004-2005. Much of this growth comes from new jeans models and niche designer brands – offering more choice and options, but making the entire selection process also more difficult for women to navigate.

CNN quotes Ellen Tolley Davis of Shop.org saying "Many consumers still want to touch and feel merchandise before they buy it. When it comes down to particular sizing for shirts and pants, there's still some room for retailers to make improvements."

This is exactly what Zafu does. They also provide a service that you will get not from many retail associates: Zafu's web site will tell you also when there is NO jean at all in their assortment to fit your body – asking you to postpone your purchase.

Zafu will tell the consumer outright and suggest she check in periodically as styles are updated. "We wondered, should we be completely honest here and show someone zero [results] or fiddle a bit," said Holloway.

They decided to be honest – and this is exactly where the value of such an intermediary comes from. But according to their estimations, their assortment of analyzed and databased jeans is already large enough to provide an exact fitting jean for 94% of all consumers. And loosing this 6% of sales (theoretical) is a good price to pay to show to the other users that they are really serious and honest about fit! Early users of the service seem to love it a lot, as this customer review suggests.

Zafu also allows women to save their profile making the process even easier next time they return. This helps them also to inform customers when a new jean is added to their assortment that exactly fits their body style. However, if a user does not want to leave any data, she does not have to do register etc.

And how does Zafu make money?

First, there are provisions for each sale. Zafu does not carry any inventory, but directs customers directly to the web sites of affiliated retailers and gets the usual commissions between 5-20% of each sale.

Second, they will provide in-house fit recommendation services to online and offline retailers, helping the customers of just one brand to navigate the assortment in a store or online shop better.

Third, I believe there is a lot of potential to extend the service to other product categories, becoming the one-stop style adviser for women with regard to fit. This could also provide some nice aggregated market research data, another potential source of revenue. For this, a cooperation between My Virtual Model and Zafu would be a perfect option.

For me Zafu is also an interesting business model as it provides another alternative to real mass customization. Zafu's parent company, Archetype, launched in 2003 a fit consulting business that provides mass customization services to some of the leading apparel retailers and brands in the US, including Land's End's Mass Customization business.

Zafu's personalization service is an alternative model. It may not have the inventory advantages and value prepositions of mass customization, but provides a much more easy to implement and much better scalable system. The future will show where there is more value for customers. I believe that both models will work hand in hand and supplement each other: For most consumers, a better matching service as zafu.com will provide sufficient value. For others, however, the ultimate product will still be the truly custom jean -- providing not only perfect fit, but also all the hedonic satisfaction connected with a custom product.

Updates: "Customized online fashion finally clicks with consumers": A journalist tests zafu.com (and competitor myshape.com) [Thanks to madeforeone.com for this link]

Report on Internet-Retailer (Nov 7, 2006): Shopping.com, a large shopping portal, has partnered with zafu.com to launch a women’s jeans finder on the shopping engine. The new feature, accessible under a link from women’s clothing category pages on Shopping.com, carries shoppers who click on it to a co-branded web site that guides them through the process to yield a selection of jeans and then links to the merchants where they may be purchased. The feature exposes shoppers using it on Shopping.com to brands they might not have previously known about or considered, but which might be a fit for them. “By suggesting new brands, styles and fits for shoppers, Shopping.com can offer them more relevant choices via a recommendation expressly tailored for them,” the company notes.

Update (20 Nov 2006): The New York Times had a good review of Zafu.com. on Nov 20, 2006 While the article in general praises the Zafu service, it remarks that it does not weigh heavily enough a user’s brand preference. But the label of a jeans is a as a big factor as the fit.

Mass Customization Case Study Collection -- New Issue of the Mass Customization Journal Published

A new issue (No. 4, Vol 1) of the International Journal of Mass Customization has just been published (see here for more general information). This issue is a special CASE STUDY issue containing eight cases from the International Mass Customization Case Collection, an initiative of more than 25 international researchers collaborating to build a broad basis for empirical research on mass customization. The idea of this project, coordinated by Klaus Moser at TUM, is to document current practices of mass customization businesses in a form that allows rich cross-case analysis and learning from previous experiences.

We are happy that we now can present the first eight cases of this collection in one issue, starting with three cases of mass customization of industrial goods:

* APC, a provider of data centre infrastructure from the US and Denmark,
* MarelliMotori, a manufacturer of electric motors from Italy,
* F.L.Smidth, a Denmark-based manufacturer of complex process plants for the construction industry.

Then, three case studies from the footwear industry provide the opportunity for cross-case analysis in one industry:

* Adidas, an international manufacturer of sports goods based in Germany,
* Left foot, a Finland-based worldwide operating provider of custom men’s shoes, and
* Design&MC Lab, a research lab and model plant for the mass customization of footwear based in the Italian shoemaking capital, Vigevano.

The two remaining cases focus on special objectives connected with the implementation of a mass customization strategy in business-to-consumer markets:

* Steppenwolf, one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of custom bicycles, and
* Turo Tailor, a Finnish manufacturer of apparel (men’s suits).

See here for authors and abstracts of all cases.

Full text access to the cases demands a subscription of the journal. But: Due to the cooperation with the publisher, we now can offer to all past participants of our conferences (MCPC, Deutsche MC Tagungen, IMCM, etc.) full online access to all issues for a very (really!) good price. Please contact me for more information and to get the special subscription form. Disclaimer: I am neither the publisher of this journal nor do I profit in any form from its sales or subscriptions.

Related posts on this topic:

- First issue of IJMassC published
- Special issue on Customer Centric Enterprises published

PS: We are extending this collection. If you want to contribute a mass customization case, please contact me as well (Important: Cases have to be contributed by independent scholars, not by members of the case company described!)

Personalization and Music: Beyond shuffling on your Ipod -- an overview of new services to customize your music experience

What we can learn from the BBC, Pandora, and Musiclens for mass customization

The traditional compilation CD is deader then ever. Instead of listening to all songs of an entire CD, most consumers today prefer just to listen to what they want on their MP3 players (a typical long tail phenomenon). But selecting, filling and arranging the playlists of these players have stayed more or less a craft business. While some persons feel joy and achievement once they have generated their very own, individual playlist, this is, none the less, plenty of work. Also, listeners are restricted to the music they known (and, more or less, own).

Sure, with satellite radio, there are now highly focused radio stations which substitute general radio broadcasts. But often, even these stations are still a bit too broad and contain songs that you don't really like too much – and too few of your real favorites.

Here, three new services provide help. Using different approaches, they allow users to customize their music experience beyond the restrictions of ownership, information about favorite songs, and the demand to manually craft a custom playlist. These services provide tools to find new music matching an individual's preferences, but also enable custom broadcasting services of a new level.

Note: I am not talking here about the option of customizing the particular song. While there are some new promising offers (e.g., at http://www.dabreakupsong.com you can create a custom rap song to break up with your partner :-), this is a minor field of application (see my posting on this subject). Most people don't want to customize their music on the level of the single song, but they want to personalize the stream of songs they listen.

BBC to Develop Personalized Radio Service

Madeforone recently reported about a new personalized radio service that the BBC is developing. The UK state broadcaster wants to allow audiences to create personal radio stations from its content, its director general has said. The service, provisionally called MyBBCRadio, aims to give audiences more control by combining existing services such as podcasts and the BBC Radio Player. It will be part of the BBC’s iPlayer, a new interface device that shall transport custom content (music, video, reportings) to each user.

With its earlier Backstage offering, the BBC has been a forerunner of user-generated content. It changed its policy from protecting its content to giving most of it away to listeners for free, allowing users to create new works by mixing their own stuff with BBC programming (more information here). NNC Backstage, however, was more an offering for leading-edge users or music lovers. But the new MyBBC Radio Service wants to bring this capability to the mainstream.

Radio 2.0: Pandora and the Music Genome Project

But personalized radio stations do already exist. Once of the best services is Pandora, a music discovery service designed to help users find and enjoy music that they like. Based on a huge database that has categorized songs of over 10,000 different artists based on unique attributes, it helps users to find music that has the same characteristics of a song or artist they like. Just type in a name of a favorite song or artist, and let the magic begin. I was highly fascinated by the quality and scope of the resulting personalized music stream (you need an US ZIP code to use this service, if you live abroad, just use 02138, my postal code).

Pandora has a totally different approach to configuration compared to the majority of other configuration toolkits. It is a good example of a need-based system, i.e. an expert system that does not demand that users can describe exactly what they want, but that just analyses what they like and provides suggestions based on this analysis.

The service is powered by the Music Genome Project. In this project, founded by Tim Westergren in January 2000, a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating a comprehensive analysis of music. They assembled hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large "music genome". Taken together these genes capture the unique and musical identity of a song -- everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, singing, and vocal harmony.

This kind of expert analysis of all songs provides the main difference of Pandora to other music recommendation systems based on collaborative filtering (as, e.g., at Amazon.com). Collaborative filtering works without any idea of the nature of the articles it is recommending, as it is solely based on comparing the usage (shopping) behavior of one user with the behavior of other users. Pandora, on the other hand, is not based on such a analysis, but solely on the nature of the products (songs) it recommends.

Pandora is offered for free in an advertising supported version (and of course the company hopes to get a provision when you buy a song you discovered though its service). There is also a subscription based service without advertising. All music is streamed, this means it is not possible to download or safe the stream (legally). With a special device, you can also listen to your very personal music channel without your computer.

More information and analysis: http://blog.pandora.com/press/

MusicLens: Configure Your Music

Now compare Pandora to MusicLens.de, a German project that aims to test four different technologies to analyze music like it has been done in the Music Genome Project. However, this service opens the Pandora box and allows you to really configure the music you like. Using more than 10 sliders, you can describe exactly the music you want to hear, like its tempo or subjective volume. You can also define the purpose of the music on a scale from listening over driving and sex to dance. And set the mood of the song (on a scale from smile to angry).

As a result, you get a play list with songs matching your desires. Sounds too complicated? You also can just provide a favorite song for the start, see its characteristics, modify them just a bit, and get new music. As this is a test project, however, the music available does not match the scale and scope of Pandora's repertoire. But the web site provides already a good indication of the service.

MusicLens uses a fuzzy search technology to find music - CDs, albums, song titles or artists - by characteristics. Searches can be carried out in large masses of data quickly and effectively. And, despite the terms of the enquiry being vague or indefinite, the results are clear. The idea is to provide users also good results when they do not know what they are looking for – a feature conventional search engines do not have. Users also do not need to use specific search vocabulary or any form of literal definitions. The search is conducted by way of various characteristics or categories, represented by the slider navigation system.

DDD-Systems, a Hamburg based IT services company that is behind MusicLens, hopes to position the system also as a business-to-business service. The search technology shall assist those involved in purchasing film, radio or television content to find the right content.

Beyond segments and clusters

Why do I write about all this? In my opinion, MyBBCRadio, Pandora, and MusicLens provide some great general insights for mass customization:

-- These services overcome the traditional categorizations (market segmentations) of music in genres. There are no clusters of "Independent", "Pop", or "Rock" music. All categorization is based on an individual user's preferences and desires.

-- Pandora and MusicLens apply modern search technologies which support a need-based configuration approach. Instead of today's dominating parameter-based configuration approach (users configure products based on concrete selections of components and modules), they help to define products based on a description of the user's needs and preferences.

-- They address the customization of services. Up to today (and also in this blog), mass customization is often solely discussed in relation to the individualization of physical products. MyBBCRadio, Pandora, and MusicLens are great examples of mass customization of service offerings.

But for now: Enough words, now go ahead and listen to your personal music.

User Profiles: How the Higgins Project can prevent mass confusion in mass customization and enable a new generation of virtual identity services

How a new initiative, the HIGGINGS project, wants to give users full control over their profiles, and what this means for better mass customization businesses.

Asked what is the genus of mass customization, I always answer customer co-design. A custom product can only be provided if the manufacturer has specific information about the demands of each particular customer. In most cases, this information is provided by an explicit act of co-design in which customers choose between options or create a configuration within a given solution space.

The problem of mass confusion

This co-design process, however, is also the reason of mass confusion, a reason why consumers often abandon a mass customization purchasing process. Mass confusion has two major reasons:

Burden of choice: One limit of mass customization is that excess variety may result in an external complexity. Users might be overwhelmed by the number of options.
Matching needs with product specifications. In addition, customers often simply lack the knowledge and skills to transfer their personal needs and desires into a concrete product specification. A pair of sport shoes becomes a rather complex product if one has to decide explicitly between different widths, cushioning options for the insole, patterns for the outsole, and color options.

The premier task of the design of co-design toolkits (configurators) is to prevent mass confusion. A premier measure for this is a starting solution so that customers do not have to start from the scratch. In a good mass customization system, there will be a pre-configuration which represents already a full configuration and which customers can modify according to their wishes (the factory121.com web site provides a good example).

To generate starting solutions, manufacturers could present a number of "standard" products (as in the case of Factory121), not connected to the individual customer. An even better way though is to customize also the starting solution according to each customer's preferences: If the Factory121 website would know that I find a particular class of watches ugly, it would present me more choices of other models. It may even present me starting solution with watches in my preferred colors, or those of my wife.

But the prerequisite for customizing the configuration process is that the vendor possesses knowledge about my preferences. If I am a returning customer, this should be the standard situation (coined "learning relationship" by consultants Peppers & Rogers). For first-time customers, however, the provision of a good starting solution is a more challenging task.

Virtual identity: The dream of the universal user profile

The optimal situation would be if the vendor could draw on an existing profile of my preferences, generated by shopping and configuring at other companies in the past, but also fine-tuned by my own feedback and demands. Such a profile would contain information about past purchases, configurations, measurements, allergies, socio-demographical data, and, of course, address and payment data. Another element of such a profile could be my previous search terms at Google and alike, representing the "Database of my intentions", as John Battle has called it in the great book "The Search" .

In short, such a profile would represent my (virtual) identity. This idea of such a unique user profile, representing the identity of a customer, is pretty old and has been discussed many times in the context of personalization and customization. And there were many commercial attempts to generate and manage such a universal user profile, like Firefly, Microsoft passport, or Sun Microsystems-led Liberty Alliance. All failed due to missing trust by users: You may trust Amazon to build such a profile of your media preferences supporting its recommendation engine, but most users do not trust Microsoft to build such a profile for their entire personal lives.

How the Higgings Project can help

At this place, a new project may provide help: The Higgins Project (http://www.eclipse.org/higgins), managed by the Eclipse open source foundation, aims to give people more control over how their personal information is used online and aims to develop so-called 'user-centric' identity management. Rather than big corporations managing identity data, the user-centric identity management approach puts individual users in the driving seat. They shall be able to decide what information they want shared with trusted websites that use Higgins-derived software. The project is supported by a large rooster of companies, including Dell and Microsoft. IBM, Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Novell, and Parity Communications all said they are contributing already code to the project.

As John Leyden reports, Higgins breaks a person's identity into pieces, allowing users to dictate who can access parts of their identity information, within applicable privacy guidelines and laws. Organizations using applications built with Higgins open source tools can share specific identity information, such as their telephone number or buying preferences, according to rules set by the individual.

This set-up will also help users to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple systems. Using service adapters, systems such as directories, collaboration spaces and email systems can be plugged into the Higgins framework. Users thus could change an address across all their online accounts more easily or delegate who can see which parts of their body measurements, for example. The only cross-vendor application working (very successfully, but proprietary and challenged by many constraints) is the Virtual Model from My Virtual Model (Full disclaimer: I am on the board of this company).

The result is a system to manage the digital identity of a user. Digital identity management are seen at the forefront of next generation web services – enabling finally the ideas of personalization and customer centricity we envisioned in our mass customization community for more than a decade.

If Higgins is successful and adopted by mass customizers, this will mean a large boost for mass customization. New research has clearly shown that mass confusion and the burden of choice are major obstacles of mass customization – preventing consumers to adapt this strategy. It would make so much sense to get a 3D body scan, if I could transport this data from one vendor to another, but still owning and controlling the use of this data by myself. And this would be just the beginning.

Identity Mash-Up: A conference on reusing identity profiles and information

The possibilities and business strategies enabled by digital identity management systems like Higgins are explored in the conference Identity Mash-Up at the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School (June 19-21, 2006). A variety of parties – governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial institutions, international agencies, and merchants – will address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and spam, but also new business models building on virtual identity.

In the business track of the conference, several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, IBM, Novell, BestBuy, and MyVirtual Model, will discuss and make public announcements about new products and services, and will demonstrate their next generation identity services. I will attend the conference and will try to report here what I learned!

If you want to participate as well: The full conference will be webcast by Harvard Law School.

More information on HIGGINS can be found at spwiki.editme.com and channelregister.co.uk

Generative Design Software Helping Users With DIY Design

One of the core problems of turning customers into co-designers is the burden of choice and the design process itself. To modify a customizable object, one has to select from parameters, make choices, click through option lists, and make decisions what one likes. The same task is also often a burden for professional industrial designers when developing a new product. Design (and problem solving in general) is trial-and-error, and to proceed with such a process to an "optimal" design demands many iterations.

Here the idea of generative design comes in. Generative design allows to produce new designs automatically by the push of a button. A basic form, pattern, or object is automatically modified by an algorithm. The result: infinite random modifications of the starting solution (within a solution space set by the designer). This automatic generation of designs allows for a much faster trial and error process. Instead of crafting a few different designs, this technique allows to create thousands of different designs -- and choosing the best. It also allows for very new designs, as the process is not restricted to the imagination of the designer.

Or as this blog explains it:

"What if our products had genes just like our animals, insects and fish? Wouldn't it then be possible to consider a vast range of variation within product design standards, perhaps letting the ecosystem (marketplace) select on those traits that were most adaptive? "

That's the inspiration behind Genometri, a Singapore based company that has recently been promoting their new generative design technology. Their idea:

"Genometri is inspired by genetics, empowering the designer with the power of evolution--the design technology of life. It allows the rapid generation of a vast number of designs based on a generic model."

Consider the image below by Patrick Chia, which offers multiple takes on a simple stool base. All modifications are machine generated, not the result of a craft design process.

In the moment offered as an add-on to CAD packages like Solid Gold, Geometri's software Genovate allows designers to explore form, texture and color in infinite possibilities. Their key breakthrough is primarily the ability to create distinctive variations and the ease with which this generative model can be set up using standard parametric CAD packages. However, spinning this idea further and making this technology part of an online configuration toolkit could bring this power to consumers. This kind of tools will become an important enabler for users to become co-designers. They lower the burden of co-design drastically while still allowing for freedom of choice and an high degree of individuality.

Update: A nice application of generative design can be seen at www.futurefactories.com. This site by designer Lionel Dean uses the technology for designing light fittings. Coimbine this with rapid manufacturing and you have a great product idea ...

New Factory121 Watch Co-Design Toolkit Launched – Best-Of-Class Example For Online Configuration

After months of development and testing, the new configuration toolkit of Factory121, the Swiss custom watch manufacturer, has been launched. Already the earlier version of this toolkit has been a great example which I have used often as an illustration of a "perfect" online configurator for BtoC in my lectures and keynotes. The new version brought the tool on a new level, and is a model of what a good online configurator should be able to do.

It is a great example what is possible if a configuration tool is developed and implemented purposeful and with understanding of the specific demands of mass customization. The new version, launched in April 2006, has reinforced this evaluation and has set a new industry standard. There are still some minor bugs to be worked out and some possibilities for improvement remain (and co-founder Daniel Morf has told me that they are working on fixing these errors), but already at this stage the configurator is leading edge.

The main elements which I consider as best practice of the new 121TIME toolkits include:

- Different entry points into the configurator (direct, from the catalog, from an mailing, etc.)

- Strong and thoughtful pre-configuration (very important point to reduce complexity from the customers' perspective)

- Good structure of the different co-design levels (while rather complex and pretty filled, the screen nevertheless allows for a easy navigation between the different design options)

- High usability and representation of rather complex design opportunities, creating a flow experience of the user

- Strong rule set preventing "bad" designs (try to design an ugly watch, this is really difficult)

- Several options to safe, compare and share designs

- Very good "consultancy" and help functionality (plenty of fields explaining you all options)

- Strong and fast visualization (try the zoom function)

- Modular pricing system allowing each customer to purchase a watch according to her own willingness-to-pay (Factory121 is one of the very few companies in the customization BtoC market utilizing this opportunity)

- Possibility to use place the toolkit in a customized way in affiliate web sites.

While single aspects of this configurator may be matched by other online configurators, it is the combination of all of its features that makes the 121TIME toolkit superior to other. Try the tool here (as with many new internet tools, you need broadband for a good experience; but still sometimes the company's server performance seems to be slow): http://www.121time.com

Prior 2 Lever: Footwear Customization With Rapid Manufacturing

Volker Junior has been one of the most active players in the German mass customization scene for the last years. His special field of expertise is rapid manufacturing, i.e. the use of rapid prototyping technologies (like laser sintering) for manufacturing purposes. As a former marketing director of EOS, one of the leading equipment manufacturers for rapid manufacturing, he was preparing the market for these technologies.

But now he not just wants to see how others use this technology, but to utilize this technology by himself. He has teamed up with the British company PRIOR 2 LEVEL (P2L) to offer the first fully customizable soccer shoe. The idea was presented already as a concept during our MCPC2005 conference in Hong Kong in October 2005. But last week, the product finally was launched officially at the London College of Fashion last week.

Sure, also Adidas has offered customized soccer shoes which go much beyond the aesthetic design customization of NIkeID and others. However, until now, all mass customization programs for footwear are based on a match-to-order system: Feet of a customer are scanned, and matched to an existing last. In most systems, a different size for the right and left foot is possible, and the library of lasts is much larger than the traditional spectrum, providing a much better fit.

P2L, however, wants to go one step further: The football boot is designed uniquely for each individual player using selective laser sintering to produce truly custom outsoles and hand-crafted one-piece leather uppers. As the U.K. Blog GIZMAG reports:

"The upper is made of exclusively sourced calfskin from Italy which can be manipulated using sophisticated technology to adapt color, appearance and function to the athlete's needs. The outsole is designed using a three dimensional scan of the individual's foot dimensions and unique walking/running style. The bespoke fit of the boot coupled with the hand crafted one-piece upper (negating uncomfortable seams and improving contact with the ball) make for an incredibly light design that preserves energy levels without forsaking protection and comfort. …

P2L's system utilizes a biomechanically optimized outsole (the base of the boot) that supports, controls and conserves the player's musculoskeletal system. Individually positioned studs based on the athlete's foot structure minimize peak forces on the foot whilst walking, running and sprinting. P2L develops relationships with players on an individual basis to help reduce injuries, improve comfort and performance over their entire career."

As this quote indicates, the P2L boot is targeting a different segment than Adidas. And despite its high-tech approach, the whole system is much closer to craft customization than true mass customization. However, it is a test of rapid manufacturing technologies for the use in footwear customization. Product development was undertaken in conjunction with the London College of Fashion, Loughborough University's Rapid Manufacture Research Group and EOS GmbH Electro Optical Systems. If this experiment is successful, the development of the underlying mass customization technologies will have made a large step forward.

More information also at Loughborough University's Rapid Manufacture Research Group.

Special Issue of IJMassC on Competitive Advantage Through Customer Centric Enterprises – Advances in Mass Customization Research, Vol. 2

Edited by Frank T. Piller, Ralf Reichwald and Mitchell M. Tseng, International Journal of Mass Customisation, Volume 1 - Issue 2/3 – 2006 (ISSN: 1742-4208).

In 1993, when we started this field of research, our graduate students complained about not many reference articles, only a score of them on mass customization at that time. Today, we can identify more than 2,500 published papers on mass customization and personalization, and their number grows rapidly. To overcome the scope and speed issues of knowledge explosion in this area, the bi-annual World Congress on Mass Customization (MCPC) has been organized since 2001.

Among the more than 250 authors presenting their work at the MCPC 2003 conference (held at the Technische Universität München, Munich), we invited a number of authors to submit a chapter for a special issue, based on their representativeness of particular issues in the subject. After a long editing and publication process, these papers has just been published as a special issue of the International Journal of Mass Customization (IJMassC, 1 (2006) 2/3).

Read the editorial paper on "Competitive Advantage through Customer Centric Enterprises" by Frank Piller, Mitchell Tseng and Ralf Reichwald in full text here (free PDF download).

The other papers have to be purchased by the publisher. Here an overview of all papers of this issue (contact Inderscience directly to order the entire volume at a special price: Inderscience Enterprises Limited, Fax: +41 22 7910885, subs@inderscience.com).

The first four papers deal with the genus of mass customization, the co-design process between each individual customer and the manufacturer in order to specify a custom product. Margarita B. Guilabert and Naveen Donthu discuss the development of a scale to measure customer customization sensitivity to evaluate whether customers are interested in mass customization anyway. It seems obvious that if consumers are not interested in customization there is no need to pursue customization strategies. Consumers may be more or less inclined toward different types of mass customized products/services, and therefore, it is critical to know how important customization is for consumers. The paper presents an approach how companies can evaluate the likeliness of customers to evaluate a mass customization offering.

Given that a mass customization offering appears appealing for a customer, Sri Hartati Kurniawan, Richard H. Y. So and Mitchell M. Tseng evaluate in the next paper how the co-design process is perceived from the customers’ perspective. The paper reports the results of an experimental investigation of differences between product configuration and product selection in terms of consumers’ decision quality. The results show that configuration offers not only greater satisfaction with the resulting products (as compared with standard products), but also increases the satisfaction with the shopping process.

The following paper provides an in-depth look on the information systems enabling the configuration or co-design process. The special topic of Rosmary Stegmann, Thomas Leckner, Michael Koch and Johann Schlichter is how customers can be supported by such a system during their design task. While configuration systems enable customers to virtually assemble a product and find a fitting specification, customers must also learn how to deal with the complexity of the product model and of the configurator tool itself. Their paper introduces different approaches to overcome the problems of complexity and uncertainty associated with this customer tool interaction.

The implications of mass customization on business information systems, however, go beyond the implementation of configuration systems, as Andreas J. Dietrich, Stefan Kirn and Ingo J. Timm discuss in their paper. They analyze the impact of mass customization on future business information systems, with focus on globally distributed value chains. Using a case study from the footwear industry, the authors develop an innovative multiagent approach, which is using information represented with explicit machine-understandable semantics for coordinating and negotiating mass customization activities throughout the supply web.

The next contribution, co-authored by Jianxin Jiao, Lianfeng Zhang and Shaligram Pokharel, proposes an approach of process platform planning to support the variety synchronization from design to production. This is a basic principle of mass customization in order to reduce the internal variety of a product architecture and to create a stable solution space and stable processes, allowing for “mass production efficiency” as a main characteristic of mass customization. The authors show how a process platform is conducive to the synchronization of product and process variety.

Rebecca Duray supplements these insights about process planning for mass customization with her paper on the relation between a company’s capability of flexibility and quality and the financial performance. Her study tests within a sample of 126 mass customizing companies the tactical requirements of a mass customization strategy and finds that teamwork and worker flexibility lead to increased financial performance for mass customizers.

The paper by Thorsten Blecker, Nizar Abdelkafi, Bernd Kaluza and Gerhard Friedrich provides another contribution in regard to defining the processes of a mass customization system. Their analysis of flexibility capabilities of a mass customizer presents a number of key metrics to measure variety and complexity in operations and manu¬facturing related tasks. The result is an elaborated system to detect the levers that should be considered to keep variety induced complexity under control.

Moving from process to product structures, Udo Lindemann and Maik Maurer discuss the early evaluation of product properties for individualized products. They present a methodology for testing and evaluating product spectra and individual products with regard to lead time optimization. Recently, a number of design techniques have been developed to improve the design of custom-made products.

The paper by Janet K. Allen, Farrokh Mistree and Gabriel Hernandez strives to combine these techniques systematically, based on the formulation of the design of customizable products as a problem of optimal access in a geometric space. Their method is illustrated with the design of a line of custom-made hand exercisers.

The remaining papers of this issue deal with special issues of mass customization. Mikko Ruohonen, Jaakko Riihimaa and Marko Mäkipää present empirical insight generated from forty case companies in Finnish metal and electronics industries. Their results reveal four different clusters of mass customization strategies which can be also interpreted as knowledge-based business strategies, reinforcing the central role of knowledge management as a success factor of mass customization.

The development of rapid prototyping technologies into rapid manufacturing systems could become a main enabler for the efficient production of custom goods, as Christopher Tuck and Richard Hague discuss in their paper. The paper focuses on the effects regarding the logistics and supply chain infrastructure with the advent of rapid manufacturing.

Guixiu Qiao, Roberto F. Lu and Charles McLean discuss the manufacturing system planning for mass customization using a simulation model of component assembly line of Boeing aircrafts. Their focus is on the evaluation of information integration to derive a data-driven reconfigurable mass customization modeling methodology.

The issue’s final paper, contributed by Joachim Warschat, Mehmet Kürümlüogl and Rita Noestdal, provides an integrated perspective of the mass customization value chain. Based on the processes for marketing, sales, design, production and distribution, a case study from the footwear industry illustrates the demands of system and data integration along this process chain. The authors present an IT architecture to support an extended enterprise offering mass customized products.

Read the full abstracts of all papers here. You can also subscribe to this journal there.

Ning.com - Mass Customization of Business Models and More

Social Web is one of the hot topics of the Web 2.0 paradigm. The term Social Web refers to an open global distributed data sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, a social web link people, organizations, and concepts. It builds on user-generated and user-distributed content. A new venture, online for less than 6 months, is now making the creation of social web applications, mixing and matching existing data in new ways, more easily as ever.

The idea behind Ning.com is to create a free online service for cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps. Think of a "Playground" for finding, creating, and sharing web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people. Ning's online platform allows users to painlessly create these web applications without any hosting demands or server administration hurdles.

Applications are created by users or by Ning. The existing standard social apps offered today include listings, reviews, ratings, recommendations, bulletin boards, dating applications, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wishlists, events, and people matching, among others. Examples are Map Mash-Ups (like Restaurant Reviews, Photo Maps, Review systems, Trail desriptions etc.), media sharing applications (Photo, Video, Book sharing), Social Bookmarks, Marketplaces (like Craiglist), Social Networking, Dating application, and many more. Users can also easily add commerce functionalities of Flickr, Google Maps, eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo! Search.

So what can users create and customize? Say, you want to create a web site which helps food loves in your region to share their favorite restaurants, add cook books written by local chefs, a matching service to find dinner dates, and a navigation system optimizing the trail for a restaurant crawl. Within a couple of clicks and trials, you can build such a web serve with Ning. This sounds for me very much like mass customization of business models: Take some generic modules, adapt and customize these, mix and configure them according to your vision, and launch the business – to either profit from it or just have fun by connecting with other people.

The idea is to put the power of social web apps in the hands of everyone. "We think it should be as easy as a few clicks to turn any great idea into reality. On top of that, we just think it's more fun when people share their great ideas.", the founders describe their motivation. "We want to put something out onto the web that inspires creativity and where it's fun to make things."

Ning provides users with a
- Free hosted environment
- Standard PHP & HTML modules,
- Lots of freely available PHP code to get you started
- SFTP support for own IDE
- The opportunity to create own ads
- Data sharing between apps
- Automatic user authentication
- a built-in search engine and tagging system, and much more.

How does Ning make money? All user generated sites have a generic Ning Sidebar to provide shared services, but also text advertising and links. I believe that they will also get provisions for purchases made at, e.g., Amazon though one of their apps. And the user base of Ning will become an important asset for the company. We will see if this idea takes off. But I liked the concept very much, and it shows a new frontier of user co-creation and mass customization in an area not discussed before.

New Special Issues and Web-Publications on Mass Customization and Open Innovation

Within the last weeks, several print or online journals have dedicated special issues to mass customization and open innovation. They contain some really great contributions on different aspects of these themes. So start browsing with this little collection:

Wood Digest – Mass Customization in the furniture industry. Wood Digest magazine is a monthly publication reaching over 51,000 woodworking professionals including those who manufacture cabinets, millwork and specialty wood products. The magazine provides global coverage of technical advances in equipment and supplies to assist its readers in overcoming productivity challenges.

The journal's January 2006 issue is dedicated entirely to the topic of mass customization – and I highly recommend to browse though it and read these articles. Especially the opening article by Don Shultz provides a great background story and general analysis. Other articles report about special application, case studies form the furniture industry or IT support.

Read the whole issue here.

How Open is the Future? A book on the Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios inspired by Free and Open Source Software. This book offers a constructive and innovative look on the boundaries of intellectual property, as well as new and open forms of collaboration, not only situated in an academic and industrial context, but in musical and artistic spheres as well.

The book is released under a Creative Commons License – this means it is freely available online as full text -- and presents an interdisciplinary perspective how open source spftware can serve as a role model for many more ideas beyond software.

From the book's jacket:

"There are two reasons why the free and open-source software issue has become such an inspirational and powerful force today: the rise of the Internet and the growing tendency to protect all intellectual property. Internet technology made it possible to handle massive decentralized projects and irreversibly changed our personal communication and information research. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is a legal instrument which – due to recent excesses - became the symbol of exactly the opposite of what it had been developed for: the protection of the creative process. As a result, free-thinking programmers, scientists, artists, designers, engineers and scholars are daily trying to come up with new ways of creating and sharing knowledge. In 2003 Vrije Universiteit Brussel launched its university and industry network called CROSSTALKS, aimed at developing a new interdisciplinary exchange dynamic for key players in society. This first CROSSTALKS book provides an open, constructive platform for a wide range of researchers, lawyers, artists, journalists and activists invited to air their complementary – and sometimes contradictory – views and discuss future prospects for the driving forces of our time."

Read more and get this really interesting book at http://crosstalks.vub.ac.be

KPMG Study "Retailers Find That Customized Clothing Is the Right Fit: Apparel retailers are waking up to the reality of mass customization in clothing." This is the title of a KPMG study which is summarized on the "KPMG Consumer Markets Insider" web site. Worthwhile analysis and some nice figures:

"Mass customization isn't just about customer satisfaction, but also about pumping up margins. About 20 percent of the population wants custom apparel -- and they're willing to pay an extra 30 percent or more for it."

"Retailers have been developing sizes based on standards that date back to body measurements taken before World War II. But the United States has become taller and heavier than previous generations, and only 10 to 20 percent of Americans fit the national standards."

"About 54 percent of consumers have difficulty in finding clothes that fit and 68 percent don't bother to try them on because they find it such an unpleasant experience. Retailers that provide consumers with the ability to customize their apparel size, could earn up to 25 percent more per purchase."

Read the whole story here.

PO Monthly is a website for people interested in operations management. They regularly run special theme issues, and the latest was dedicated to mass customization. Topics include a general overview and discussion, a look on MC web design, and a great case study on mass customization in architecture. See the full issue here.

The Manufacturer, another online magazine for the manufacturing community, recently run a focus article on manufacturing, too. Pamela Derringer reports on general mass customization issues and explains the systems of Dell and LEGO in more detail.

The International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems just issued a special issue on mass customization. Number 4 of Volume 16, guest-edited by Ashok Kumar and published by Springer, has four long academic papers on different mass customization aspects: Mass Customization: Metrics and Modularity, by Ashok Kumar; Mass Customization: Reflections on the State of the Concept, by Frank T. Piller; Process Variety Modeling for Process Configuration in Mass Customization: An Approach Based on Object-Oriented Petri Nets with Changeable Structures, by Jianxin (Roger) Jiao, Lianfeng Zhang and Kannan Prasanna; Mass Customization in Videotape Duplication and Conversion: Challenges of Flexible Duplication Systems, Fast Delivery, and Electronic Service, by Gregory R. Heim. Check the abstracts of all papers here.

However, to read the full text, you have to pay a VERY heavy price for each paper, so I do not advertise this more as it just supports an old and outdated business model (but the papers are worth it and great contributions to the field!). Check if your local university library has subscribed to the journal or if you find a full text database with its content.

Talking about outdated: The issue officially has the date "October 2004", which is strange as I wrote my contribution for this particular issue in summer 2005. There are probably good reasons of the publisher for this, even if these are beyond the understanding of their customers. But this is just another reason why open access publishing as proposed in the Crosstalks book mentioned before is a more sustainable model for the future.

Finally, a special issue on mass customization in GERMAN LANGUAGE only: OSCAR, eine hoch professionelle Studenteninitiative an der Uni Köln, hat ihren neusten OSCAR Trend Newsletter unter das Schwerpunktthema Mass Customization gestellt. Die im Web verfügbare Ausgabe enthält viele spannende Beiträge:

Mass Customization: Definition und Charakteristika von Detlef Schoder und Stefan Grasmugg geben eine Einführung in das Themengebiet und stellen einige der entscheidenden Merkmale heraus.

Exklusive Meisterwerke - vom Massenprodukt zum Unikat Professor Bruhnke ist Geschäftsführer der BMW M GmbH, einer 100%igen Tochter der BMW AG. Er ist neben den M Fahrzeugen und dem Fahrertraining auch für den Bereich BMW Individual verantwortlich – die wirkliche Individualisierung im Hause BMW (jenseits von Mass Customization). Bruhnkes Beitrag stellt die Historie und das aktuelle Angebot von BMW Individual vor und gibt einen Ausblick in die Zukunft.

Mass Customization: Prinzipien und Erfolgsfaktoren. Mein Artikel in diesem Newsletter beschreibt einige Mechanismen und Erfolgsfaktoren von Mass Customization.

Von der Mass Customization (MC) zur Seriellen Unikatfertigung (SU). Kristin Müller ist Geschäftsführerin des Möbelherstellers InVIDO GmbH. Die dort praktizierte "serielle Unikatsfertigung" ist ein Modell von Mass Customization in der Möbelindustrie. Müller beschreibt aus praktischer Sicht, wie sich Mass Customization in ihrer Branche darstellt und welche künftigen Entwicklungen sie für möglich hält.

Mass Customization - Kundenwunsch vs. Massenramsch von Nils Holle, Trend Recherche der OSCAR GmbH. Während seiner dreimonatigen Recherchetätigkeit für das Magazin hat er unterschiedliche Tendenzen und Strömungen der Mass Customization kennen gelernt. Vom Standpunkt des Beobachters zeigt er, mit dem unvoreingenommenen Blick des Verbrauchers, Grenzen dieses Themas auf.

Re-Post: Mass Customization of Software (from the MC Newsletter 2/2004)

Re-Post: I have republished these articles to make them better accessible for search on the blog. This article has been published first in the Newsletter No. 2/2004.

This guest article by Jorn Bettin, Managing Director of SoftMetaWare, a consultancy that provides strategic technology management advice, introduces the mass customization concept as it applies to the development of mass-customized software products.

In the software engineering community the techniques and technologies necessary for mass customization of software are part of the discipline of software product line engineering. Mass customization of software is somewhat different from mass customization in other industries, where the transition is from mass production to mass customization.

In the software industry the transition to mass customization is about providing an economically superior alternative to both of:

* Manual development of off-the-shelf software products, which may or may not be configurable/customizable, and where the total cost of ownership is driven upwards not only by high costs for the base product, but also by very high costs for configuration and implementation.

* Manual development of expensive one-of-a-kind custom applications.

In other words the paradigm shift is from "massive manual customization and configuration" to "massive automated customization and configuration". The main objective is to raise the level of abstraction of software product specifications to a level that relates to the problem space rather than the solution space (software technologies).

The first step towards mass customization of a software product is the derivation of design templates for software products of a certain type from one or more prototype product instances. The design templates are then used in conjunction with user supplied specifications for a specific product to automatically generate a corresponding product instance.

In the world of software it is very easy to expose thousands of configuration options and switches to users, and the varying needs of customers have led vendors to continuously increase the degree of configurability of their products. Enterprise resource planning systems provide a prime example of extremely complex configurability, and in fact this complexity has become a major cost issue for those wanting to implement such systems.

Software product line engineering tackles this problem head-on by ensuring configuration knowledge is presented to the user in an intuitive format, and by ensuring the user can't create an "illegal" configuration. For example, when configuring a product, the user should be provided with a single selection of the country that the software is used in, rather than separately needing to specify country-specific address formatting rules, date formats, legislation options for accounting, etc. In software product line engineering a process of domain analysis is used to uncover the deep domain knowledge required to build domain-specific [configuration/specification] languages that prevent users from creating "illegal" configurations. In many cases software product instances can be drastically simplified by applying some product specifications at "product generation time", i.e. before the software is compiled and deployed in a specific environment. This approach minimizes the post-installation configuration effort, and often it also reduces the overall size of the software, which is less of an issue for enterprise systems, but can be an important factor in the development of embedded software.

So far the theory. In practice, time-to-market requirements usually don't allow the significant ramp-up period postulated by most software product line engineering methodologies. At OOPSLA'03 (http://www.oopsla.org), a group of researchers and practitioners met in a birds of a feather session to share their experiences. The objective was to define the foundation of a new paradigm for software development that builds on software product line engineering principles, but which also is compatible with the principles of the Agile Manifesto (http://www.agilemanifesto.org). The result is a paradigm called Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD).

The relationship between MDSD and software product line engineering can be compared to the relationship between Component Based Development and Object Technology: One builds on the other, and the terminology of MDSD can be seen as an extension of the terminology for software product line engineering. The concept of core assets from software product lines carries through into MDSD and is directly reflected in "Industrialized Software Asset Development", the subtitle of MDSD.

What sets MDSD apart from classical software product line engineering is the emphasis on a highly agile software development process. One of the highest priorities in MDSD is to produce working software that can be validated by end users and stakeholders as early as possible. This is consistent with the major shift towards agile software development methodologies in the industry. MDSD provides the scalability that is not inherent in popular agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming.

Further Reading

Model-Driven Software Development, http://www.mdsd.info

Jorn Bettin, 2004, Model-Driven Software Development: An emerging paradigm for industrialized software asset development, http://www.softmetaware.com/mdsd-and-isad.pdf

Jorn Bettin, 2004, Model-Driven Software Development Teams: Building a software supply chain for distributed global teams, http://www.softmetaware.com/distributedsoftware-product-development.pdf

Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, Software Product Line Practice, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/plp/plp_init.html

Contact the author at Jorn Bettin, jorn.bettin@softmetaware.com, www.softmetaware.com, Tel +64 9 372 3073

Rapid Manufacturing Platform promotes information and discussion on main technology enabling mass customization

The term rapid manufacturing (RM) refers to the generation of production components either directly on an rapid production machine or as part of the process chain, using similar technologies as known for rapid prototyping. The idea is to produce finished manufactured parts, not prototypes. The benefits of RM over many conventional production processes are easy to appreciate -- it completely removes the expensive process of producing tooling. In principle, parts can be manufactured as soon as the design process has been completed and changed at the touch of a button. This makes RM the perfect manufacturing technology for mass customization in many areas.

But until we are at this state, there are still many steps to go. Most of today's applications involve relatively small quantities of (small) parts. In fact, Terry Wohlers, a leading rapid manufacturing expert, states that it is unlikely that RM will ever reach the production capacity of processes such as injection molding, die casting, or sheet metal stamping. For many mass customization companies this may not matter. Nevertheless, for most organizations RM is still seen as science fiction.

This is why two European research organizations, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft from Germany and TNO from the Netherlands, have initiated the Rapid Manufacturing Platform, an open collaboration platform on the internet to foster exchange of information and knowledge on RM.

Companies and other organizations are invited to visit this virtual counter for all kind of information regarding RM. The website contains publications, case studies and scientific papers to show RM capabilities. There is also a forum to raise a question or start a discussion with experts in the field. The forum is coordinated by Anton Gerrits from TNO [Anton.Gerrits AT tno.nl]. He invites managers and scientist alike to use this forum and contribute with their own material.

Have a look at http://www.rm-platform.com