Customer Reviews

Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a refreshing book that is inendated with facts and research, yet the concepts have implementable steps to move your organization into the personalization future. Indeed this author "gets it" when it comes to the individualized services and products that every company should adopt.

Fantastic! The fact that this book was written in 1993 is particularly astounding, as its ideas are still cutting edge today. Internet entrepreneurs need to read, re-read, and workshop this book, as it is particularly useful from both a practical and conceptual standpoint in helping companies realize how their business models need to change once they begin to participate in markets where supply is infinite -- an issue that strikes at the core of e-commerce.

After reading the book, I found a clearer picture about mass customization. Mass customization is now widely used by many businesses, but we may not know how it operates!
In this book, it tells you how you should change your business operation to mass customization step by step, also tell you 5 methods to customize your products or services. And these 5 methods are useful and practicable for designing how the business enter the market.
The stucture of the book is clear, give a full description on the development of the operation, from mass production to mass customization , and the pros and cons of those two operations, followed with the detail explanation on mass customization.
However, I think it's a bit outdated because all the things around us are mass customized and we do not have to decide whether we should change to customized operation or not, but to decide the degree of the customization.

This book contains a winning formula for production industry to success under the dynamic economic environment and rapid changing consumer taste.

Joseph is prescient to identify an important trend on production since 1993. Although this book was written a decade ago, ¡§Mass Customization¡¨ still occupies a crucial position on maintaining an effective and efficient production line.

In this book, Joseph first introduced the main trend on production before 1970s, which was ¡§Mass Production¡¨. Then, he mentioned the change on production from ¡§Mass Production¡¨ to ¡§Mass Customization¡¨. He used a comprehensive comparison to locate the distinctive advantages of applying ¡§Mass Customization¡¨.

After persuading audience how imperative the change was. Joseph suggested three directions for companies to plan for their change: ¡§Move Incrementally¡¨, ¡§Transform the Business¡¨ and ¡§Create New Business¡¨. He also suggested five fundamental methods for companies to implement their change.

As the product life cycle becomes shorter and shorter, especially for technology related products, companies can¡¦t use only the ¡§Push¡¨ strategy to produce their product. However, they also can¡¦t produce their products only when receiving an order. It is because there is no enough time for them to do. As a result, ¡§Mass customization¡¨ helps companies to produce a critical mass for basic elements and then assemble the final product base on customer¡¦s requirement.

Moreover, Joseph used many tables and graphs to explain his idea, which help readers to understand the concept easily. Also, he provided many subtitles that help readers to concentrate on the main idea in the following paragraph.

Furthermore, it is interesting that Joseph also customized his book too. He grouped the chapters, which based on specific objective. By this action, he reinforced the main idea of ¡§Mass Customization¡¨ and facilitated readers to read this book.

In short, this book has a clear direction and systematic layout, which guide readers to understand the full picture of changing production trend.