The Life Cycle of Manufacturing Networks in the Mass Customisation Era

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

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.