Conference Report: MCP-AP 2010 - Mass Customizaton in Asia Pacific

 Just coming back from two weeks of heavy travel that brought me from Cologne to Frankfurt, Bangkok, Taipei, New York, Quebec, and Brussels, and today finally back to Aachen and Cologne.  One of the core events of this trip was the MCP-AP 2010, the "Mass Customization & Personalization Conference Asia Pacific".

The idea of the MCP-AP is, along with other regional conferences, to create a platform for exchange and collaboration on mass customization and personalization. We were a great crowd of people in Taipei. As expected and targeted, about 80% of the participants came from Asia, representing countries like China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam.  The rest was a nice circle of old friends and MC enthusiasts from Europe, Canada, and the US. In total, about 300 different people participated over the course of the three conference days.

The event took place at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, a premier university of technology in Taiwan (with one of the best industrial design schools in the world (recently ranked #4), and hence all the conference graphics and setups really were innovative and great).

We had a number of great conference keynotes, and also some very interesting PhD student papers. This is what I learned from the days (very subjective report, just what stuck in my mind):

• Research on MC and sustainability is coming. Slowly, but steadily. We had a number of good presentations on the topic. But still there are plenty of measurement problems and especially questions on where to draw the boarder of the system analysis. Claudio Boer from SUSPI in Lugano presented a very interesting new European project on sustainability drivers of MC.
• The term "mass customization" is getting more and more fuzzy. Roger Jiao had a nice keynote presentation with a very good summary of research in the field from the last 10 years, and he proposed the term "personalization" to denote the concept of really "personal" products as those being created for example by rapid manufacturing or other digital / parametric manufacturing technologies that do not any longer demand a pre-defined set of options. I am not sure whether I will adopt this definition, but the trend is there.
• Also, we had a great presentation by Dr. Yih-Ping Luh, CEO of OLE Technology Ltd. Canada. He is working with some of the largest companies in the world to organize flexible supply chains, and had a nice concept of assortment customization in large scale for different retail formats. This definitely is mass customization thinking, even if the unit of analysis are batches of products, and not individual solutions.
• Quasi or defacto standards for configuration systems are developing, as Paul Blazek from Cyledge in Vienna showed in his presentation. This means that consumers start to learn how to operate a configuration toolkit, and that companies have to make wise decisions whether to meet a standard (like placing the configuration progress bar in a specific corner) or breaking with it as a point of differentiation.
• Confortable high-heels are possible (even very high ones). It was great to see again Prof. Ravi S. Goonetilleke from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, one of THE world experts in footwear design, and an old friend in the mass customization domain. He presented a new "scanning" (measurement) device to evaluate the perfect and most comfortable heel for an individual woman. Not that I am personally in the need for it, but it is leading edge research that really addresses the needs of MANY people.

On top, there was a great social program with excellent food (Taiwan has, in my opinion, some of the best Asian cuisines) in great locations like the world's highest restaurant (in Taipei 101) or the historical Palace Museum.

Thanks a lot to the local organizers around conference chair Prof. Shuo-Yan Chou and the great head of the organizing committee, Ms Hime Wang, for a great MCP-AP experience!

More information: For more information on the conference and a documentation of the program and presentations, please head to the conference website.

Comments

[Joe Pine]

Thanks for the report, Frank! But say NO to "Personalization"!! In the normal consumer's mind (mine too) that term already has a grounded meaning: an otherwise standard offering with something simple done at the end of the process for me -- like monogrammed towels, T-shirts with my image or text on it -- which I call "cosmetic customization".

I think the greater term -- the *largest* term -- should be "Individualization". That encompasses all aspects of Mass Customization, Craft Production, Personalization, Digital Production, Rapid Manufacturing, 3D Printing, Co-Creation, and anything else you can think of. It means the final offering is done on-demand, made personal to the individual customer in some way, by whatever means.

I think it also is the word that stands over all of my work and writing.