The Life Cycle of Manufacturing Networks in the Mass Customisation Era
Read this article. The research focuses on network design performance in our current era of product customization and personalization. With online order volume steadily increasing, what network design considerations do you feel are necessary to successfully fulfill custom orders?
Introduction
Mass production (MP) has been the established
manufacturing paradigm for nearly a century. MP initially answered to
the need of the continuously increasing population around the globe,
with a gradual improvement in its living standards, especially in the
developed world, for goods and commodities. However, since the 1980s and
with the beginning of the new millennium, a saturation of the market
towards mass produced products is observed. In 2006, Chryssolouris
states that: "It is increasingly evident that the era of MP is being
replaced by the era of market niches. The key to creating products that
can meet the demands of a diversified customer base, is a short
development cycle yielding low cost and high quality goods in sufficient
quantity to meet demand". Currently, the need for increased product
variety is intensifying, and customers in many market segments request
truly unique products, tailored to their individual taste. Companies are
striving to offer product variety while trying to produce more with
less (i.e. maximise their output while minimising the use of
materials and environmental footprint), while the landscape that they
must operate in, inflicted by the economic recession, has become more
complex and dynamic than ever.
In the mass customisation (MC)
paradigm, the establishment of which is still an ongoing process,
instead of treating customers merely as product buyers, a producer must
consider them as integrated entities in the product design and
development cycle. In this customer-driven environment that is shifting
towards online purchases and market globalisation, the underlying
manufacturing systems and chains are heavily affected. Owing to its
multidisciplinary nature, the manufacturing domain in general lacks of
unified solution approaches. The management of the co-evolution of
product, process and production on a strategic and operational level is a
huge challenge. Market globalisation broadens the target audience of a
product, while at the same time it constitutes supply strategies and
logistics' more difficult to manage. Adding to that, the Internet, one
of the primary enablers of globalisation, allowed online customisation
and purchasing, leading to new disruptive purchasing models. In their
turn, these models affected long-established businesses that could not
form an online presence fast and succumbed to the competition. Moreover,
the economic recession highlighted the need for quick adaptation to
demand; companies that could not adapt to the new requirements suffered
economic losses and their viability was challenged. Simultaneously, the
decreasing product costs and the increase in purchasing power in
developing countries generated new markets and destabilised demand.
Finally, the emergence of new materials, new forms of production, and
key enabling technologies constitute new diversified product features
and processes feasible, as well as they allow the interconnection
between ICT systems, humans, and engineering/manufacturing phases.
It
becomes apparent that manufacturers and service providers are presented
with numerous external and internal drivers and challenges that
have a visible impact on the smooth operation of the entire value-adding
network down to each individual manufacturing facility. A root
cause for these problems is that while the MC paradigm proposes a set of
practices and solutions for tackling these issues, its practical
implementation is still considered as work in progress in terms of
effectiveness of coordination and collaboration between stakeholders,
design and planning of networks and facilities, and execution and
control efficiency. An enabling solution for realising a
cost-effective implementation of MC is to properly configure easily
adaptable manufacturing networks, which are capable to handle the
complexity and disturbances that modern production requirements inflict. Support systems for the design, planning, and control with inherent
robustness are necessary in order for companies to withstand the
antagonism through sustainable practices. Technology-based business
approaches comprise a major enabler for the realisation of robust
manufacturing systems and networks that offer high value-added,
user-oriented products and services. These qualities are critical for
companies in order to master variety and maintain their viability.
Significant work has been conducted on this field, yet a focused review
of the literature regarding the influence of MC practices on different
aspects of the manufacturing network life cycle is missing. In
particular, the lack of dedicated reviews on the challenging issues of
design, planning, and operation of manufacturing networks in the
framework of MC forms the motivation for conducting this work.
Towards
bridging this gap in academic approaches, this work reviews the
existing literature related to the basic aspects of a manufacturing
network from its design, planning, and control life cycle perspectives
within the general MC landscape, targeting to the understanding of the
current situation and identification of future developments. For the
scope of the paper, areas of supplier selection, initial manufacturing
network design, supply chain coordination, complexity, logistics
management, inventory and capacity planning and management, lot sizing,
enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management
(CRM), and supply chain control are reviewed. The purpose is to
establish an overview of the current status of academic research and
pinpoint the challenges that have yet to be addressed by academic work.
Departing from that, major drivers and enabling technologies are
identified, as well as concepts that can lead to a more sustainable
implementation of MC are proposed.
The review is based on
structured search in academic journals and books, which were retrieved
primarily from Scopus and Google Scholar databases, using as keywords
the main fields of interest of the study, namely: evolution of
manufacturing paradigms, issues in MC and personalisation environments,
the role of simulation for manufacturing, methods and technologies
related to product and production complexity, and inventory management
and capacity planning, among others. Academic peer-reviewed publications
related to the above fields were selected, ranging over a period of 30
years, from 1984 to 2015, with only a few notable exceptions. Sciences
that were considered in the search were: engineering, management,
business, and mathematics. The review was carried out in three stages:
(1) search in scientific databases with relevant keywords, (2)
identification of the relevant papers after reading their abstract, and
(3) full-text reading and grouping into research topics. Indicatively,
the frequency of results from a search with the keywords "mass
customisation" or "product personalisation" in the abstract, title, and
keywords of the article as obtained by the Scopus database is depicted
in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1 Frequency of appearance of the
keywords "mass customisation" and "personalisation" in the abstract,
title, and keywords of the article
![](https://learn.saylor.org/pluginfile.php/5619134/mod_book/chapter/50004/01.jpeg)
The above
figure also visualises the increase of interest on these topics by the
scientific community, and the establishment of MC as a distinct field of
research. The trend resembles a typical hype cycle. In the beginning,
the abstract concept of MC is born from the realisation that product
variety is increasing. Then, key enabling technologies, such as the rise
of the Internet, web-based collaboration means, and flexible
manufacturing systems act as a trigger in the spread of MC, quickly
reaching a peak during late 1990s and early 2000s. Until then, most
studies are concerned with management and strategic issues of MC,
failing to address critical MC implementation issues. Afterwards,
researchers realised that a series of sub-problems ought to be tackled
first, leading to research indirectly associated with MC (e.g.
investigation of product family modelling techniques). Nevertheless, MC
is here to stay, therefore, research interest on complete MC solutions
starts appearing after 2005 and continues up to the current date.
The
rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the
evolution of manufacturing paradigms and discusses the recent shift
towards customer-centred manufacturing. Section 3 performs a literature
review on major topics related to the life cycle of manufacturing
networks, together with the latest advances in ICT for supporting the
design, planning, and control of manufacturing networks. Section 4
summarises the challenges that need to be addressed, aided by a generic
view of the manufacturing landscape of the near future. Finally, Sect. 5
concludes the paper.