Mass customization and customer centricity : in honor of the contributions of Cipriano Forza /: in honor of the contributions of Cipriano Forza. (2023)

• Record Type: Book
• Further Information: Note: Edited by Thomas Aichner, Fabrizio Salvador.
• Editors: Aichner, Thomas; Salvador, Fabrizio, 1971-
• Other Names: Forza, Cipriano 1962- honouree.
• Contents: Editorial Thomas Aichner Fabrizio Salvador About This Book Introduction, explanation why this book was written (collection of contributions from leading mass customization researchers to celebrate Professor Cipriano Forza's 60th birthday and his career as a world-leading expert in mass customization), chapter outline and short summary of main contributions. Laudatio Roberto Filippini The Academic Story of Cipriano Forza: A Brief Overview (First paragraph preview of the Laudatio): Late afternoon, June 1992, Monte Berico. There are only three people in the Operations Management Lab at the Institute of Management and Engineering: Cipriano, another PhD student, and me. Cipriano is hunched over his keyboard - the data he's working on for his doctoral thesis isn't quite adding up the way he'd like it to. He's been sitting there for weeks. His mobile rings and his eyes widen when he sees his wife's name appear on the display: 'Where are you?' 'I'm... on the way home...' 'You said you'd be back early!' Cipriano, abruptly jolted back into the real world, stands up and motions us - as we attempt to stifle our laughs - to be quiet... 'I'll be home in a few minutes.' He sits back down and continues to tap away at his computer, the phone call already a distant memory. Sometimes, a person's passion for research is all-consuming. This comedic episode recurred on several occasions, each of which has been etched into my memory. 1 Alessio Trentin Fabrizio Salvador Form Postponement Types and Market Contingencies: Toward an Isomorphism of Mass-Customization Strategies and Form Postponement Types Key words: form postponement, operations management, strategies 2 Fabrizio Salvador The Ghost in the Machine: A Multi-Method Exploration of the Role of Individuals in the Simultaneous Pursuit of Flexibility and Efficiency Operations Management research has been dominated by the quest for organizational or technological approaches to building flexibility and efficiency into a firm's operations, paying little attention to the role of human agency—the capacity of individuals to affect the organization through their purposeful action. We address this gap in the literature by means of a multi-method, empirical theory-building study that investigates how managers and employees within an organization cope with the efficiency-flexibility trade-off. We generate a preliminary set of propositions through an interview study involving 46 subject matter experts from Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. We subsequently re-examine these propositions using a survey-based triangulation study involving 276 managers operating in the same five countries. We provide a more general rationale for our propositions by borrowing the attention-based view of the firm as well as theoretical contributions from the organizational memory and organizational improvisation literatures. We propose that people operating within an organization's workflow contribute to reducing the efficiency-flexibility trade-off by supporting the execution of three tasks that cannot be fully codified 'a-priori', which we label prospecting, blueprinting and patching. Additionally, we find that the abilities supporting the execution of these tasks must be distributed across the workflow functions for efficiency and flexibility to be obtained. Finally, in contrast with extant literature, our findings downplay the role of production workers in the attainment of efficiency and flexibility. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for the literature on manufacturing flexibility, ambidexterity and operations strategy. Key words: mass customization, individualism, operations management 3 Lars Hvam A. M. Staskiewicz Niels H. Mortensen Anders Haug The Role of SKU Management in Product Variety Reduction Projects To address customers' increasing demands for specialized products, manufacturers are offering an increasing amount of standard and customized products. For many manufacturers, this has resulted in uncontrollable product proliferation and a struggle to manage their product variety. To address this problem, many manufacturers have initiated product variety reduction programs. Unfortunately, many such initiatives fail to achieve the intended financial benefits. While the existing literature provides numerous studies and methods for product variety reduction (PVR), research investigating the link between PVR projects and SKU (stock keeping unit) management is scant. However, there are reasons to believe that this link could partially explain why some PVR projects fail. This assumption was investigated by studying an unsuccessful PVR project at an international world-leading hearing healthcare company. In the case studied, initially, the project appeared to provide significant reductions in inventories. However, a deeper analysis revealed that these stock reduction potentials appeared significantly larger than they were because of untransparent SKU management. Specifically, the analyses found that approximately 20% of the hearing devices in the product portfolio were associated with multiple SKUs and that the inventory-related benefits from the PVR would be minimal. On this basis, a model describing three levels of experienced product variety and two types of product variety discrepancies is developed. Key words: variety management, operations management, product variety, mass customization 4 Igor Kalinic Internationalization of Production in SMEs: Organizational Challenges and Strategic Opportunities Due to the changes occurred in the last decades an increasing number of SMEs is presented with the opportunity to internationalize also the upstream activities. This exploratory study analyses the consequences of the internationalization of production on SMEs. We propose to focus the future research on both the organizational changes that are stimulated by this kind of internationalization and on the consequent impact on the firms' competitiveness. The results suggests that internationalization of production is challenging. SMEs need to adapt to the increased complexity; however, this provides them with the opportunity to develop sustainable competitive advantages over competitors that stay local. Key words: SME, internationalization, mass customization 5 Elisa Perin Alessio Trentin Enrico Sandrin Integrating Mass Customization and Environmental Management: An Organizational-Capability Perspective Key words: mass customization, environmental management, organizational capability 6 Paul Blazek Creating Customization Experiences: The Evolution of Product Configurators A systematic review of the technical, functional and behavioral development of online sales configurators. The focus of this chapter is on how to create an individual, custom experience or in other words, how to customize the customization experience. Key words: online sales configurators, product configuration, mass customization 7 Abdel Monim Shaltoni Thomas Aichner Customized Digital Marketing Communications This chapter is about customization in digital marketing practice, specifically digital marketing communications. Specifically, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview on marketing decision making in a digital environment, for example e-commerce, and outlines how companies can and should use data to customize communication with customers in order to increase efficiency and return on investment. Key words: digital marketing, online marketing, e-commerce, marketing communication 8 Paolo Coletti Thomas Aichner Online Shopping Preferences in Mass Customization: A Comparison Between 2008 and 2021 Mass customization has become important to business because of the difficulties for customers in finding what they want despite an increase in product variety for many categories over the past decades. The emergence of modern technologies in production and communication, however, allows companies to offer customized products and services without relinquishing economies of scale. The advent of web interfaces has finally given the opportunity to achieve completely the involvement of the customer in the product's entire design process. In this chapter, a survey on more than 500 European customers from 2008 is replicated in 2021, again surveying more than 500 European customers. The results show a declining willingness of customers to compromise on the issue of suitability of products to their personal needs and preferences, the possibility for companies to break brand loyalty through mass customization and the influence of immediate availability, delivery time and price on the customer's willingness to take part in the co-creation process of products. Key words: online behavior, online shopping, e-commerce, mass customization 9 Chiara Grosso Enhancing Digital Social Interaction While Shopping via Online Sales Configurators E-commerce is taking a more social, creative, and collaborative approach with customers in online marketplaces that engender social commerce (SC), an online commercial application that implements social-technology features to enhance customer involvement at different levels of the online shopping experience. SC is new but fast growing—it is spreading to the majority of e-commerce activities. Companies that sell customizable products through online-sales configurators (OSCs) can start implementing SC using mass-customization systems that incorporate social features through social product-customization systems. Complementing an OSC with social software (SSW) enrich the configurator environment with a highly interactive features to support user's digital social interactions. Studies on social recommendation posited that the potential of social relations can be exploited to complement recommender systems implemented in e-commerce environments by collecting social interactive feedback while users are shopping online (e.g., ratings, clicks, and favorites). Such arguments are based on the likelihood that
• Publisher Details: Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication Date: 2023
• Extent: 1 online resource (373 pages), illustrations (black and white)
• Subjects: 670.427; Mass customization; Customer relations
• Languages: English
• ISBNs: 9783031097829
• Related ISBNs: 9783031097812
• Notes: Note: Description based on CIP data; resource not viewed.
• Access Rights: Legal Deposit; Only available on premises controlled by the deposit library and to one user at any one time; The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations (UK).
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