Portland International Conference on Management Engineering and Technology, Cape-Town, South Africa, 27 - 31 July 2008, pp.1171-1178
The need for product customization during product development processes will continue to increase. Mass customization (MC) relates to the ability to provide customized products or services through flexible processes in high volumes and at reasonably low costs. There exist different strategies for the degree of customization in product development. Determining the right strategy of customization is essential to the competitiveness of a company. For this reason, to support managerial decision making, this paper proposes a strategic evaluation framework based on the analytic network process to assess effectively MC strategies in product development process. Finally, a case study is given to illustrate the proposed approach.