Abstract

Mass customization (MC), an organization’s ability to provide customized products and services that fulfil each customer’s idiosyncratic needs without considerable trade-offs in cost, delivery and quality, is gaining importance among companies. To help practitioners on the complex path towards MC, academic research has provided some guidelines for MC implementation. Recent reviews in this research sub-stream underlined the lack of MC implementation guidelines (MC-IGs) specifically developed for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and also indicated the opportunity to use the design science research (DSR) strategy to develop new MC-IGs. The present research answers call for new MC-IGs by developing maturity grid-based MC implementation guidelines for SMEs that comply with the MC-IG building blocks and the MC-IG properties indicated by Suzić, Forza, et al.. The development of such guidelines followed a DSR strategy that included short- and long-term observational evaluations in two SMEs over three years.

摘要

大规模定制 (MC) 是一个组织提供定制产品和服务以满足每个客户特殊需求的能力，而无需在成本、交付和质量方面做出相当大的权衡，这在公司中越来越重要。为了帮助从业者走上通往 MC 的复杂道路，学术研究为 MC 实施提供了一些指导方针。最近对该研究子流的评论强调了缺乏专门为中小型企业 (SME) 开发的 MC 实施指南 (MC-IG)，并且还表明有机会使用设计科学研究 (DSR) 战略来开发新的 MC- IG。目前的研究答案呼吁通过为符合 MC-IG 构建块和 Suzić、Forza 指示的 MC-IG 属性的 SME 制定成熟的基于网格的 MC 实施指南来建立新的 MC-IG，