WAC 5 (Wednesday, April 28, 2021)

Group Number 11 Members:

Muhammad Abdullah Rehman F2019-541
Syed Hamza Sibtain Naqvi F2019-663
Sheikh Saad Sohail F2019-326
Rana Ahmad Imam F2019-634
Muhammad Haris Azam F2019-372
WAC 5 (Wednesday, April 28, 2021)

“Mass Customization at Hewlett-Packard: The Power of Postponement”

by Edward Feitzinger and Hau L. Lee.
Companies in all branches of industry are being enforced to react to the rising individualization of
demand, yet, at the similar time, growing competitive pressure dictates that costs must also continue
to fall. Companies have to implement strategies which embrace both a closer response to the
customers’ needs and efficiency. Mass Customization meets this challenge by proposing individually
customized goods and services at mass production efficiency. However, while Mass Customization has
already been discoursed in the literature for more than a decade, increased practical implementation
of this strategy can been found in business only within the last years. This time gap may be clarified
by the fact that only since few years’ sufficient technologies happen to handle the information flows
connected with mass customization. Particularly as mass customization enters more and further
consumer markets, new Internet technologies can be seen as its main enabler. To connect strategies
discussed in Electronic business with the field of bulk customization, the paper deploys a structural
approach to create mass customized concepts within electronic business.

Mass customization is presented as one of the ways to deal with the increasingly demanding and
turbulent environments. Achieving mass customization requires the development of
multidimensional strategic capabilities. In an evolutionary process these capabilities can be
developed. In this paper the capabilities required to realize mass customization are made explicit and
postponement is presented as an operational method to move towards a mass customization
strategy. Among various mass markets, companies are facing a dilemma, customers are demanding
not only ever sooner order fulfillment but also highly customized products and services. The authors
show how the Hewlett- Packard Co. and others have showed that one certainly can deliver customized
products quickly and at a low cost. The key to mass-customizing successfully is postponing the task of
distinguishing a product for a specific customer until the latest possible point in the supply network.
Instead of taking a fragmentary approach, companies must reconsideration and incorporate the
designs of their products, the processes used to create and supply those products, and the
configuration of their whole supply network. By implementing such a comprehensive approach, they
can function at maximum efficiency and rapidly meet customers’ orders with minimum amount of
inventory.

Some of concepts for mass customizing given in article are: Modular Product Design (A product with
a modular design provides a supply network with the flexibility that it requires to customize a product
quickly and inexpensively. Such a design separates the composition of end products into parts or
subassemblies, some of which are common to all product options, others of which are not. If the
groups are not properly coordinated, their attempts to optimize their own performance may hurt the
company’s ability to create the most efficient supply network that can deliver a customized product
at the lowest cost. Therefore, negotiations among these groups are critical.) Modular Process Design
(Breaking down the production process into independent sub processes provides companies with the
kind of flexibility that effective mass customization requires. Such an approach is based on three
principles: process postponement, process resequencing, and process standardization.) Agile Supply
Network (Determining the optimum number and location of factories and distribution centers is a
complex decision).