Mass customisation in sustainable networked enterprises

Abstract

To cope with the customer-oriented business model in a global competitive market, enterprises tend to be networked for achieving mass customisation: i.e. offering customisable products with the same efficiency as mass production. This scenario highlights two faces of variability: variability of needs (on customer side) and variability of organisations (on production side). Both types of variability induce a huge number of specified products, namely configurations. This configuration variability must be efficiently managed. This position paper discusses trends and issues for rationalising the number of configurations: i.e. engineering the right number of configurations that match both the customer needs and the production strategy. After this positioning, we propose a systemic perspective for addressing the discussed issues from a sustainability point of view. Finally we give a perspective for a product line definition method that leads to models that meet the discussed variability rationalisation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.