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This book features state-of-the-art contributions from two well-established conferences: Changeable, Agile, Reconfigurable and Virtual Production Conference (CARV2020) and Mass Customization and Personalization Conference (MCPC2020). Together, they focus on the joint design, development, and management of products, production systems, and business for sustainable customization and personalization. The book covers a large range of topics within this domain, ranging from industrial success factors to original contributions within the field.

Mass customization as a strategy has been utilised successfully in the manufacturing industrymeeting customers’ idiosyncratic needs in a cost-efficient way. The productivity of the Danishmanufacturing industry has increased six times over the last 50 years, whereas the Danishconstruction industry has only doubled. Mass customization has not been extensively exploredin the construction industry; therefore, the theoretical background is currently limited. Nevertheless, utilization of mass customization as a strategy might have potentials in the constructionindustry. This research is a multi-case study of 11 companies in the construction industry focusing on how the cases apply the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization 1)solution space development, 2) choice navigation and 3) robust process design, and how theirimprovement initiatives effect performance, and how the cases plan to develop the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization. The outset is an analysis of project phases and critical success factors characterizing the cases followed by an analysis of how the cases applyand plan to develop the nine tools and approaches supporting the development of the threefundamental capabilities of mass customization. The data are collected through interview as atwo-way communicative approach providing holistic and in-depth explanations of the 18 variables of the analysis. The results are that all 11 cases aim at increasing all nine tools andapproaches, which strengthen the utilization of the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization in the sense of improving the productivity. This research put forward a definition ofmass customization intending to make the concept more visible and accessible for the construction industry. Mass customization as a strategy has been utilised successfully in the manufacturing industry meeting customers’ idiosyncratic needs in a cost-efficient way. The productivity of the Danish manufacturing industry has increased six times over the last 50 years, whereas the Danish construction industry has only doubled. Mass customization has not been extensively explored in the construction industry; therefore, the theoretical background is currently limited. Nevertheless, utilization of mass customization as a strategy might have potentials in the construction industry. This research is a multi-case study of 11 companies in the construction industry focusing on how the cases apply the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization 1) solution space development, 2) choice navigation and 3) robust process design, and how their improvement initiatives effect performance, and how the cases plan to develop the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization. The outset is an analysis of project phases and critical success factors characterizing the cases followed by an analysis of how the cases apply and plan to develop the nine tools and approaches supporting the development of the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization. The data are collected through interview as a two-way communicative approach providing holistic and in-depth explanations of the 18 variables of the analysis. The results are that all 11 cases aim at increasing all nine tools and approaches, which strengthen the utilization of the three fundamental capabilities of mass customization in the sense of improving the productivity. This research put forward a definition of mass customization intending to make the concept more visible and accessible for the construction industry.

The ability to adapt to changes in products, processes and technologies is a key competitive factor. Changeable manufacturing paradigms have emerged to address this need, but the industrial implementation remains challenging. In this paper, a participatory design methodology for changeable manufacturing systems is proposed, including requirements specification, selection of appropriate manufacturing paradigm and suitable physical and logical enablers. The methodology supports companies in determining the potential for and mechanisms of transitioning towards changeable manufacturing systems, based on knowledge of products, production, technologies and facilities. The developed methodology is applicable to both new and existing manufacturing systems. It is demonstrated in two industrial cases which highlight its applicability and differences in the appropriate recommended manufacturing systems transition towards changeability as a result of differences in manufacturing characteristics, change requirements and enablers.

In today’s global manufacturing environment, changes are inevitable and something that every manufacturer must respond to and take advantage of, whether it is in regards to technology changes, product changes, or changes in the manufacturing processes. The reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) meets this challenge through the ability to rapidly and efficiently change capacity and functionality, which is the reason why it has been widely labelled the manufacturing paradigm of the future. However, design of the RMS represents a significant challenge compared to the design of traditional manufacturing systems, as it should be designed for efficient production of multiple variants, as well as multiple product generations over its lifetime. Thus, critical decisions regarding the degree of scalability and convertibility of the system must be considered in the design phase, which affects the abilities to reconfigure the system in accordance with changes during its operating lifetime. However, in current research it is indicated that conventional manufacturing system design methods do not support the design of an RMS and that a systematic RMS design method is lacking, despite the fact that numerous contributions exist. Moreover, there is currently only limited evidence for the breakthrough of reconfigurability in industry. Therefore, the research presented in this paper aims at synthesizing current contributions into a generic method for RMS design. Initially, currently available design methods for RMS are reviewed, in terms of classifying and comparing their content, structure, and scope, which leads to a synthesis of the reviewed methods into a generic design method. In continuation of this, the paper includes a discussion of practical implications related to carrying out the design, including an identification of potential challenges and an assessment of which tools that can be applied to support the design. Conclusively, further areas for research are indicated, which provides valuable knowledge of how to develop and realize the benefits of reconfigurability in industry.

Global competition forces companies to respond to fast changing market conditions by introducing new and innovative products rapidly and more often at competitive prices. Meeting these challenges sets strict requirements in order to cope with the variety of products during both ramp-up and production. The Reconfigurable Manufacturing System meets these challenges of high variety by adapting to the capacity and functionality needed when needed. Thus, implementing reconfigurable manufacturing affects the performance during both ramp-up and production. Still, the evaluation of the reconfigurable manufacturing potential has only received limited attention even though it is highly related to justifying its investment. One practical case based example of investigating the potential in reconfigurable manufacturing has though been carried out in high volume manufacturing. However, quantifying and investigating the potential in reconfigurable manufacturing for low volume manufacturing has to our knowledge not been carried out. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to measure the potential of reconfigurable manufacturing in low volume industry, carried out by use of a case-study in Danish industry. Thus, this paper presents an approach for decision support that can be applied by low volume manufacturing companies.

Group Technology plays an important role in mass customization, coping with the difficulties in multi-product, small-lot-sized production, due to the importance of product and part-family formation. There have been many applications of Group Technology organizing manufacturing facilities, and many approaches have been created, but none of these has been found to be universally suited to all types of companies. Hence, many companies use instead their own systems for their particular applications. Based on an existing manufacturing environment, this paper contributes to the process of machine-part-family formation by identifying machine-part formations and process similarities. Additionally, configuration of a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System based on one particular part-family identified is carried out with the purpose of assessing the line balancing problem of high variety.

Intensified competition and increased demand for customization have put manufacturing companies under pressure for finding more efficient approaches at handling the operations. As a response to this, mass customization (MC) has arisen as a strategy aiming to build the capabilities needed for delivering customized products, while maintaining the economies of scale. Engineering change management (ECM), which concern the handling of technical changes, is another field that has grown in importance with the increased demand for customization. Despite the commonalities of these two fields, the relation between MC and ECM has until now not been studied. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study in a global manufacturer. The paper contributes an overview of the key enablers of ECM for pursuing the MC benefits. Based on this, the paper contributes with new knowledge on the relation between the maturity of ECM capabilities and the success of MC.

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems are attractive options for realizing the competitive strategy of mass customization, due to their ability to quickly introduce new products and rapidly change functionality and capacity. However, achieving such efficient reconfigurations requires continuous reduction of production ramp-up. This is a rather challenging task, as ramp-up periods generally are characterized by many unforeseen events and problems that create high uncertainty and difficulties in realizing planned performance. Therefore, the aim of this research is to empirically investigate ramp-up challenges in two case companies, a large enterprise producing high-volume standard electronic products and an SME producing low-volume customized excavators. Through this multiple-case study, significant differences in ramp-up challenges are identified and related to product volume, product variety, and company type. The findings provide a valuable addition to current research, which is mainly related to ramp-up in high-volume industrial settings.

Recent research shows that the productivity in the Danish construction industry has only doubled since 1966, which is significantly less compared to other sectors in Denmark. However, increasing industrialization has achieved results in other industries in Denmark in terms of increasing productivity.

As mass customization is becoming a more widely adopted business strategy, not only large companies but also SMEs are beginning to adopt mass customization. Previous research suggests that in order to become a successful mass customizer, companies must hold three fundamental capabilities: solution space development, choice navigation, and robust process design. Since mass customization often requires complex systems related to these three capabilities, this is often resource consuming and can thus be challenging for SMEs due to the smaller scale compared to traditional mass customizers. This paper analyzes six cases of SME mass customizers, by describing and comparing the challenges they have been faced with implementing mass customization. This paper focuses specifically on the capability choice navigation and thus addresses the expected benefits and challenges these companies have encountered in relation to product selectors, product configurators, or other systems used for matching customer requirements with selection within the company’s product variety.

Engineering changes are inevitable, and their effective management (ECM) is essential in order for companies to sustain their competitiveness. The challenges in industry on ensuring an efficient ECM have been evident for years. The literature on ECM, however, falls short in giving comprehensive guidance for improvement. This article takes the first steps in developing a holistic maturity framework that is designed to guide improvement effort within ECM. The result of the development, an ECM maturity grid, is presented. The grid is a multilevel framework, and offers maturity assessment on a five-level scale, within five overall process areas, and 26 sub-process areas. A design science approach, aligned with a process for developing maturity grids, is followed to ensure a structured and deliberate approach. The paper contributes furthermore with a comprehensive overview of the critical success factors for an efficient ECM, which is used as basis for identifying the process areas of the maturity grid. Based on an industrial validation by 14 domain experts, it is concluded that the ECM maturity grid offers a valuable basis for providing targeted guidance on how to achieve an efficient ECM. Further development is, however, needed, for the grid to support maturity assessment.

The changeability of manufacturing systems can be of great importance for manufacturing companies to react rapidly and cost-effectively to market and product changes. Creating the basis for increasing the reuse and reusability of the manufacturing system then becomes critical since such capabilities would minimize the cost and/or investments that traditionally follows NPI projects and/or generally handling product variety. To accomplish the changeability of a manufacturing system one important enabler is modularity, which facilitates reusability. The basic concepts of modularity and platform architectures applied in product development can often be directly transferred to a production context though it does not necessarily imply that methods introduced as generic product modularization methods can be adopted directly with the purpose of developing modularized manufacturing systems. However, this paper adopts a method from product development literature to identify the optimal modular structure. Thus, this paper provides a methodology to apply module drivers in the design of modular manufacturing equipment, demonstrated on an industrial example.

Reconfigurable manufacturing has been widely labelled the manufacturing paradigm of the future, due to its ability to rapidly and cost-efficiently respond to changing market conditions. Manufacturing reconfigurability can be dealt with at various levels of the factory, and includes multiple design and operational issues related to both physical and logical reconfigurations. The purpose of this paper is to review state-of-the-art literature on reconfigurable manufacturing and provide an overview of the current body of research, by assessing which structuring levels of the factory and corresponding research issues that are dealt with. Conclusively, currently unexplored areas and interesting issues that could be addressed in future research are identified.

Cradle to Cradle (C2C) is a concept which is gaining acceptance as a way to design products which as a minimum are sustainable. This paper seeks to contribute to the C2C methodology by providing guidelines for determining product architecture in the product design process, which supports the C2C concept. The paper describes the linkages between product architecture and reusability in the technosphere (as opposed to the biosphere) which is an enabler for C2C. It is concluded that modular product architecture designing product families based on product platforms rather than designing individual products can enable C2C. Furthermore, reconfigurability also has potential to increase the reusability of parts of products.

To enable product configuration of a product family, it is important to develop a model of the selected product family. From such model, a product configurator, in which customers can specify individual products from the family, can be developed. To further utilise the product family model for planning and executing production, the model should be enriched with additional data. The idea is that, when any individual product is specified using the product configurator, a product model can be extracted with all data, necessary for manufacturing planning. In this paper, issues of creating manufacturing structures and related planning data in product family models are presented. Primarily, the more complicated multi-level manufacturing structures are considered and it is argued that the models need to specify other structures for manufacturing compared with the product structure resulting from configuration. Furthermore, the addition of attributes for planning data is addressed.

In today’s global manufacturing environment, manufactures must respond to the challenges of quickly adopting new technologies and provide an increasing number of product varieties, while continuously increasing cost-efficiency. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems meet these challenges through rapid and efficient changes in functionality and capacity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a practical approach for evaluating the potential of reconfigurability in manufacturing companies, through a case-study in Danish industry. In this approach, historical production data is analyzed and focus is explicitly on capacity savings, which makes it applicable for decision support in companies that are in a transition towards becoming reconfigurable.

The production ramp-up process is critical to stay competitive and to capture market share but there are some common problems encountered during ramp-up. Among others one problem is related to the maturity of the production processes, including unforeseen bottlenecks. This paper contributes to the production planning part of the ramp-up process by showing how to predict the process time for new parts that is to be introduced in an existing manufacturing environment. A statistical model based on historical product-data is applied and the potential advantages of the model are outlined.

This paper presents a data mining method for analyzing historical configurationdata providing a number of opportunities for improving mass customizationcapabilities. The overall objective of this paper is to investigate how specificquantitative analyses, more specifically the association rule Apriori, can support thedevelopment within the three fundamental mass customization capabilities. Theresults of the Apriori analysis can be utilized for improving the configuration process by introducing soft constraints and consolidating the product structure by joining components or modules and finally for improving production planning and control.

Implementation of mass customization and product configuration in companies requires fundamental considerations about how products can fulfil the demand from customers. In order to support such decision-making, a multi-level model for customization is developed. This model identifies four different levels of customization, ranging from the structure level at the bottom, through the performance level and the experience level, to the learning level at the top. The model also has a dual view with customers/demand at one side and product/supplier at the other side. It is a rather general model, which can be applied to many types of products, and typically, product designers must decide how far up in levels the customization should aim. In this paper, the four-level customization model is applied to wheel chairs.

Differentiated planning is one of the means for today’s companies to accommodate the increasing needs for product variety, delivery responsiveness, and cost-efficiency. Even though, product segmentation is the foundation for such planning, planning nervousness has not yet been addressed from this perspective. This paper seeks to establish a relation between planning nervousness and segmentation by analyzing the current body of literature with the objective of identifying overlaps between the two areas. The literature characteristics are assessed and directions for future research are provided.

Mass customization (MC) has been introduced as the future of manufacturing, and great results have been proven. Recent research, however, documents a high failure rate for companies trying to adapt to MC as a business strategy. Making this transition is, as highlighted by several scholars, an enterprise transformation that requires strategic control mechanisms. This paper contributes to existing MC literature with an overview and analysis of available MC performance assessment methods. Shortcomings of the literature are identified and directions for future research given.

This paper addresses the issue whether the concepts mass customization and sustainability are fundamentally compatible by asking the question: can a mass customized product be sustainable? Some factors indicate that mass customized products are less sustainable than standardized products; however other factors suggest the opposite. This paper explores these factors during three life cycle phases for a product: Production, Use and End of Life. It is concluded that there is not an unambiguous causal relationship between mass customization and sustainability; however several factors unique to mass customized products are essential to consider during product development.

Successful enterprises are distinguished by their sustainable development reliant on their ability to learn and develop innovative solutions. Recyclability (material and product design) and recycling (process design) emerge as new paradigm for sustainable competitiveness.

Modelling and simulation tools support to reduce the number of physical prototypes in the development of multidomain systems. Virtual prototyping of the multidomain systems is one of the essential steps to decrease the time of the product development. In mechatronic systems, mechanical, electrical and software domains cannot be developed independently from each other at the beginning of the earliest design phases. Integrated, virtual and mathematical models are developed as they are less time consuming and are less expensive than physical prototypes. This paper explores design process of mechatronic product development with the aid of models. V-model is used as a basic approach in the design process. Virtual model of an electromechanical system is developed by using Bond graph method and the response of the system is simulated in a software tool 20-sim. This development process is summarised in a model from design integration to simulation of the system. Furthermore, the overall design process of the system is illustrated in a model that is based on mechatronic module development. That includes mainly the allocation of requirements to individual domains and illustrating the steps in the design process.

Drawing on empirical material from a research project on new technology and skills, the author discusses the scope for personnel strategies within a context of varying social constraints. He concludes that within a given production and at a given level of technology, a variation of strategies for staff training and development may emerge. It is argued that the style of management plays a considerable role in determining job design and skill development.

Intensified global competition, fast developing technologies, and changing customer demands have resulted in a trend towards increased differences in customer requirements, increased need for customization, shorter product life cycles, shorter windows for market opportunity, and rapid new product introductions. Thus, production ramp-up is becoming a more and more important stage in the lifetime of a product, which manufacturers need to be able to handle frequently and efficiently in order to gain competitive advantage. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) are attractive options for handling this, as the system can be continuously reconfigured in accordance with the demanded volumes and products. However, the development of the RMS is a particularly challenging task compared to the development of a traditional manufacturing system. Therefore, the aim of the research presented in this paper is to investigate prerequisites and barriers for developing reconfigurable manufacturing. Initially, the paper presents a review of current literature on reconfigurable manufacturing with an identification of the prerequisites for its implementation. Moreover, through a long-term case study, their presence and the barriers towards their adoption and development in industry are investigated. The findings suggest multiple barriers for the successful development of reconfigurable manufacturing in industry. Conclusively, these findings are discussed and considerations for future research are proposed in order to aid the transition towards reconfigurability in industry.

Developers of automated manufacturing systems are often categorised as Engineer-To-Order companies, relying on the ability to offer solutions that are tailored to the individual consumer. Managing product variety and enabling reusability between solutions becomes key concepts towards increasing competitiveness and revenue, in which Engineer-To-Order companies may benefit from adopting Mass Customization concepts. As automated manufacturing systems tends to be software intensive, it become equally important to enable reusability for physical components and for software related artefacts. In parallel to Mass Customization, Software Product Line Engineering has emerged as a way for software developers to manage variability and reusability. This paper seeks to combine the concepts of Mass Customization and Software Product Line Engineering, by introducing a development framework applicable for Engineer-To-Order companies offering automated manufacturing systems.

Mass customization has been regularly used as a growth strategy during the last decades. The strength of this approach stems from offering products adjusted to customers’ individual needs, resulting in added value. The latter resides in the word ‘custom,’ implying unique and utilitarian products allowing for self-expression of the consumer. Researchers and practitioners however predominantly focused on the company’s internal processes to optimize mass customization, often resulting in market failure. As a response, a framework with five factors determining the success of mass customization was developed. Additionally, Living Lab methodologies have been used to improve innovation contexts that were too closed. This paper will fill a gap in the literature by demonstrating that the integration of the five-factor framework in the Living Lab methodology is well suited to determine the possible success or failure of a mass-customized product in the market by means of a single case study.