Lands’ End which was acquired by Sears in 2002, enlarging his shop at Sears in 2007. Lands’ End adds in-store monogramming and more small stores that provide access to the site of Lands’ End. Even customers can return merchandise that has already passed more than 20 years. Customers of Lands’ End can use its website to order jeans, pants, chinos and shirts that are tailored to their specifications. Customer fills in his/her specifications to a form at the website, which then will be sent through a computer network to develop an appropriate size for such customers. Individual patterns are then sent electronically to the factory, then the patterns will be used to trigger the cutting equipment materials. There are almost no extra production costs because the process does not require additional storage, which is too much production, inventory and costs to the customer is only slightly higher than the garment which is mass produced. At Lands’ End Live, anyone who shop online at landsend.com can send PS to customer service staff. If you have questions about a particular garment, customers can ask directly. Lands ‘End reported that the additional customer service of this kind adds 6 percent to their sales when a customer uses Lands’ End Live.
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Group 7: Mass Customization Mini Case
Mass Customization definition: a flexible production system to deliver a product to order that matches the needs of an individual customer or user (Randall, Terweisch and Ulrich, 2003)
Five different principles of user design:
1) Customize the customization process;
- Different customers have different type of buying behavior, thus we need to serve different customers with different sales techniques (in terms of user friendliness).
- Types of interface: 1) Parameter based 2) Needs based
- e.g: Dell website’s different user interfaces
2) Provide starting points;
- Consumers differ greatly in the extent to which they wish to affect the design of a product.
- Different starting points: 1) Free form design 2) Combinatoric configuration 3) Starting points
- e.g: Customatix, Adidas miCoach, NikeID
Mass customization, is it an effective production method?
Since the period of Henry Ford’s car industry until late 90’s, product efficiency requires mass production. Companies were using labor divisions, standarisation and automated processes to create products in large quantities. Economies of scale insists emphasising on mass production since it reduces cost massively. Industries rely on mass production to minimise costs. One example of mass production in car industry is Ford model T.
Ford model T – The first car that was mass produced.
However, new technologies such as CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) are damaging the economy of mass production. Since both allow mass customisation towards the needs of customer. Mass customisation includes flexible production process to create goods and services that are intertwined with each customer. The future of manufacturing was actually started with mass customisation.
Mass customisation offers advantages for both customers and factories. Customers can get the product they want, based with their tastes and needs. For the factory, they create more customer satisfaction, at the same time, improve production efficiency. In some industries, mass customisation method may result in little or no inventory of finished goods or semi-finished, no expired products are full of dust on a shelf or showroom; and require less working capital.
However, there are several weaknesses of mass customisation that I found:
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Consumer Value Creation 