How do you feed the growing appetite for mass customization?
Get personal with cutting-edge manufacturing inspired by time-honored craftsmanship
Mass customization. Production of one. Made to order. Mass personalization… whatever you call it, customized production is the industrial revolution of our time.
Transportation original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), next generation innovators, and their strategic suppliers, need to revolutionize their plants and manufacturing processes to remain competitive, profitable and responsive to global/local opportunities.
The third wave of mass customization is happening now. People are not just customizing to fulfill their own needs, but to create niche markets and serve them efficiently.
Insights from experts
Mass customization requires digital continuity at an enterprise level across engineering and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class operational performance that meets today’s customer expectations.
3D modeling and simulation of both product and process is critical – but using one without the other has only a marginal positive impact on the goal of profitable, flexible and responsive mass customization.
A centralized innovation platform founded on 3D technologies for both product and process – applying model-based definition and single source data unification right across engineering and manufacturing – is the marque of an agile organization that’s prepared to be a leader in the mass customization movement.
The need for speed
New Product Introduction (NPI) also needs to be accelerated for those companies wishing to be first to market. Such acceleration is achieved with rapid manufacturing process design, integration and deployment, yielding shorter Time-To-Market and Time-To-Volume.
Multi-purpose robots now make it possible to manufacture unique items at nearly the pace of high-speed mass production. The cars they assemble come off the assembly line in small, highly customized batches, like a high-tech version of hand-made craftsmanship from a bygone era.
Inspiring Manufacturing Transformation in the Digital Era
Collaboration is key
Austria’s 3CON has built a solid reputation as a leading and highly innovative global manufacturer of automotive interior machinery for tier 1 suppliers. The company chose Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE® platform because it wanted to allow globally dispersed project stakeholders to access a centralized data structure to improve collaboration and innovation.
The platform’s flexible, open environment also enables 3CON to collaborate and exchange information with clients. “In this way, they can easily provide us with the data that forms the basis for the customized machine we will manufacture for them before design begins and throughout the development process.
Not easy but necessary
Nobody is pretending that the kind of transformation companies must undergo to compete for ‘the order of one’ is easy. But it is utterly necessary and now, with the latest technology, totally possible. Big changes need to happen upstream – starting with engineering and the way that the production system is designed and built – and then changing the way the production system is run.
Mass customization is the ability to take an order of one. It will initially create some hardship in the supply chain because all the cogs in the supply chain aren’t set up for that. So, you might have a great solution but if there’s weak link in the supply chain, it fails. The companies that do figure it out, that can use digital as an advantage, are going to accelerate growth.
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