MAKING MASS CUSTOMIZATION WORK

Scores of companies, including Toyota, Amdahl, Dow Jones, and Motorola , have been trying to become mass customizers: businesses that produce individually customized goods or services at the cost of standardized , mass-produced goods. The appeal is understandable. Generations of ex ecutives have believed that they could not customize and have low cost s and high quality. But mass customization is a way to have it all. Ma ny aspiring mass customizers, however, have stumbled. Toyota, for exam ple, had to retreat from its goals of offering customers a wide range of options and delivering a made-to-order car within three days. Toyot a - and other companies - did not realize that mass customization is n ot simply an advanced stage of continuous improvement. True, companies must first achieve high quality and low costs, and they must develop a highly skilled, flexible work force capable of handling a large degr ee of complexity. But successful mass customization calls for more: to tal transformation of the organization. Mass customization entails bre aking up the tightly integrated networks that form the backbone of the continuous-improvement organization and creating a loosely linked col lection of autonomous modules. Each module performs a different task a nd is perpetually reconfigured in response to customer demands. Automa tion typically is the key to linking these modules so that they can co me together quickly and efficiently. Leaders of mass-customization org anizations never know exactly what customers will ask for next. All th ey can do is strive to be more prepared to meet the next request. To t hat end, mass customizers are forever changing and expanding their ran ge of capabilities.