Effective and efficient customization through lean trans-departmental configuration

Abstract

Todayʼs organizations tend to offer customized products and services to satisfy challenging customer needs. In this context, product customization spans product variant configuration as well as actual custom engineering. Particularly custom engineering induces various obstacles that organizations must overcome in order to effectively and efficiently realize inter-departmental communication and smooth internal order processing. Both are mandatory to achieve customer satisfaction and outcompete competitors. These obstacles span topics in the fields of recommendation-driven and knowledge-centered customization, knowledge engineering and maintenance, organizational learning, as well as intra-departmental process alignment. Based on first-hand insights and expert interviews, we identify the main business requirements when faced with process innovations and technological challenges in this context and discuss shortcomings of available approaches in common practice. We also report preliminary results that include the conceptual design of a knowledge-centric configuration framework designed to overcome the obstacles raised.