Mass-Customization: From Personalized Products to Personalized Engineering Education

During the past two decades, organizations have transitioned from the model of massproduction to the model of mass-customization of products as a way to maintain their competitiveness. Mass-customization refers to the ability “to customize products quickly for individual customers or for niche markets at a cost, efficiency and speed close to those of mass production, relying on limited forecasts and inventory” [1]. The key objective in masscustomization is to design products that can be rapidly customized to satisfy a variety of different requirements. While the notion of mass-customization has increased the capabilities of organizations to satisfy diverse customer needs, the costs for masscustomization are considerably higher than those for mass production [1]. Hence, the primary design challenge is to keep the costs low while maintaining high customizability. To address this challenge, the key design principles to enable mass-customization are product platforms, modular design [2], ease of replacing components, part standardization, adjustable designs, dimensional customization, dimensional standardization, supply chain customization, and maximization of external variety while minimizing internal variety [3, 4]. Platform design simplifies product offerings and reduces part variety by standardizing components so as to reduce manufacturing and inventory costs and manufacturing variability (i.e., the variety of parts that are produced in a given manufacturing facility), thereby improving quality and customer satisfaction [4].