Once was the time when the term “mass customization” must have seemed like a puzzling oxymoron to North American manufacturing professionals schooled in the ways of low-cost, high-volume mass production.

 “Mass customization, I think, is one of the best ways that U.S. businesses can continue to compete,” says Rick Smith, vice president of channels and professional services at RuleStream Corp., a Wakefield, Mass., enterprise software provider. “Customers generally are willing to pay more for an exact fit to their needs, and that’s exactly what mass customization shops are set up to do.”

Build-to-order

Mass customization means different things to different people. But the term today is often used synonymously with phrases such as build-to-order (BTO) or configure-to-order (CTO). And in a growing number of cases, companies in engineer-to-order (ETO) businesses are also adopting mass customization tools and techniques as a way to streamline their order-taking and engineering processes.

One of the most oft-cited examples of a successful build-to-order manufacturer is Dell Inc. The $57 billion Round Rock, Texas-based personal computer (PC) maker has built a highly successful business by letting individual consumers choose from a pre-configured menu to select exactly the components they want built into their PCs. A wide variety of other products are also built-to-order, ranging from cars, fire trucks, motorcycles and boats, to windows and doors, clothing and shoes. The list also includes industrial products as diverse as pumps, irrigation gates, and electrical and electronic enclosures.

“If you buy a high-end Porsche, you’re basically buying capacity in the factory, and if you choose, you can configure everything down to the color of the stitching in the seats,” points out Paul Loftus, managing director for the North American industrial practice of consulting firm Accenture, in Reston, Va. “You also see it in the aerospace business, and in heavy equipment such as tractors and earthmovers. The features and functions you can get on those products is amazing, and all of it is configurable.”

Configure it

The key word is “configurable.” Software “product configurators” are critical components of most mass customization operations.

A basic configurator incorporates the engineering rules and formulas governing how various standard and pre-engineered components available for a configurable product can be put together. The choice of a certain engine for a vehicle limits which transmissions may be selected for that vehicle, for example. Some configurators can also handle more complex engineering changes or parametric variant modifications that can be made to components. The size of a window might be variable within predetermined dimensions, for instance.

Depending on the product, a configurator interface may be made available to consumers over the Web, as in the case of Dell. But for more complex products and for most industrial products, the configurator is typically used by a manufacturer’s sales force or by order entry personnel, who work with customers in configuring products for order.

The configurator takes the user through a series of questions to configure a product, then calculates costs and delivers price quotes or estimates based on components selected and modifications requested. The order data is typically passed along to the manufacturer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which configures a bill of materials and drives supply chain orders or part replenishment based upon the order selections.

The configurator data is often used to determine routing information and print up work instructions for operators on the production floor, or provide program data for driving factory computer numerical control (CNC) machines. In the case of ETO, or engineer-to-order, products, the order output data may be fed to computer-aided design (CAD) systems.

Most of the major ERP vendors offer configurators for use with their products. ...