The Role of the Product Design and Manufacturing System Dyad in Efficient Personalized Production

Abstract

Product personalization will play a key role in the future of society by making these products available for everyone, everywhere. Personalized production requires the involvement of the customer in the design process. Thus, tools to identify which components and modules allow for customer interaction are needed, and to further assess the effects of customer interaction on the product design and the manufacturing system. In this article, we propose a framework to analyze the extent of personalization a designer and a manufacturing firm can achieve in the context of efficient personalized production. We study this as a dyad of product design and manufacturing system, which uses two main attributes: product modularity and manufacturing configuration complexity. To demonstrate our ideas, we use two applications. The first is a case study for gearbox, usually manufactured at high levels of efficiency under the mass production paradigm. The second case is an application for the footwear industry for the particular case of a sneaker, a sports shoe that is prone to be customized. These case studies show the flexibility of this framework to a wide set of industries. In both cases, we compare a personalization scenario with a baseline scenario and provide managerial insights.