VALUE OF PERSONALIZATION: AN INTEGRATED PRODUCT DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS APPROACH

Product personalization is a manifestation of a person's uniqueness. It provides the customer with an opportunity for self-expression, creativity, and differentiation. Involving the customer in the product design process has a key role in the attainment of personalized production. The challenge for the manufacturing firm is to make personalized production efficient and available for everyone. This research focuses on the degree to which a manufacturer can offer a practical level of personalization by studying the relationship between product design and manufacturing system. We use a decision-analytic framework to relate product architecture, manufacturing configuration complexity, technology flexibility, and customer engagement point. We study the effects of the customer's interaction with the product design at a component and aggregated level using modularity measures.

The effects of personalized requirements are considered in the manufacturing processes by using a complexity measure. Then, we use a Bayesian network to assess the change in complexity and the overall change in the manufacturing system. We apply this approach to a gearbox example typical in a manufacturing setting. Further, we extend this framework to include product-service systems in the context of assistive technologies where we study the relationship between software structure and hardware specifications in terms of perceived performance. Additionally, we propose a game-theoretical approach to adapt these ideas to a competitive and cooperative game in the context of a shoe manufacturer. The competitive game aims to identify what components allow for customer interaction while the cooperative game aims to identify the coalitions of designers and manufacturers that can be created in a network when in-house personalization is not possible. Overall, this framework allows a manufacturer to evaluate the relative effort to fulfill customer specifications and provides the manufacturer with insights regarding their own product design and manufacturing capabilities in relation to personalized production.