What is mass customization in manufacturing?

Mass customization means offering tailored products at close to the speed and cost of standard production. Your customers choose dimensions, materials and options, while your factory keeps working with proven components and processes.

Take an industrial door that comes in any width, with a choice of panels, windows and drives. Every customer gets their own door, but none of them is a completely new design.

How do manufacturers achieve mass customization?

Manufacturers achieve mass customization by engineering their product once, as modules with rules for how they combine, and letting every order be configured within those rules. Take the industrial door again. It works in three layers:

Modules. The door is split into parts your engineers design once: frames, panels, windows and drives, each in a set of sizes and finishes.
Rules. Rules decide which combinations are valid and what they cost. A door above a certain width needs a reinforced frame, and a heavier panel needs a stronger drive.
A configurator. Sales teams, dealers or customers choose the options. The configurator only allows valid combinations, calculates the price, and turns the order into a quote and a Bill of Materials for production.

This production model is called configure-to-order. Our guide to configure-to-order manufacturing compares it with engineer-to-order, make-to-order, and assemble-to-order.

Most manufacturers already have the modules. What's usually missing are the rules: written down, complete, and owned by someone. The signs below show whether your product is ready.

Is your product ready for mass customization?

Look for repetition. If most orders are variations on something you've built before, but each one still takes time in sales or engineering, the groundwork is already there. The signs usually look like this:

Your product breaks down into modules. Most orders combine the same components and options, and they fit together in known ways. If they don't yet, modular product design comes first.
Quotes wait for one or two people. Nothing leaves until someone who knows the product has checked what fits together and what it costs.
Errors come from combinations. Parts that don't fit together reach production, because the dependencies live in people's heads or in a catalog.
Your range grows faster than your documentation. Every new variant adds combinations nobody has written down.
Engineers redo their own work. They redraw and recalculate combinations you've built before, instead of working on new products.

Recognize several of these? Then your product is probably ready. The next question is whether your organization is.

What does your team need to have in place?

A ready product only gets you halfway. The other half is your team: the knowledge of what can be combined has to move out of a few heads and into a shared system that someone keeps up to date. That takes four things:

Rules that are written down. Compatibility, pricing, and approvals live in a system, not in someone's head. For example, a pump above a certain flow rate needs a larger motor, and discounts above an agreed level need a manager's approval.
A route for the exceptions. Requests outside the rules go to engineering with the configuration attached, so your engineers start from a spec instead of an email.
Clean master data. Components, prices, and Bill of Materials structures live in one system, so sales, your ERP, and production all work from the same data.
An owner for the rules. Someone on your team maintains the rules after go-live and adds new products, so you don't depend on the person who built the first version.

That last condition is easy to underestimate. HACO, a manufacturer of press brakes and shears, quoted with a tool one of its own employees had built. When he retired, nobody in-house could add new products or change the rules anymore. Today, the company keeps its rules in the low-code Design Studio of Hive CPQ. "Recently, I added all product logic for a new product model, an entry-level model of our press brake, into Hive CPQ myself. So dealers can instantly offer it to their customers. It's so simple!" says Sam Hast, IT Manager at Haco.

How do you get the rules out of one person's head?

Start by finding out where the knowledge sits today. In many companies, a few people know which combinations work, and everyone else works around them.

Linum, a supplier of configurable gaskets and shelving systems across Western Europe, knows this well. What could be combined was mostly known by one person in sales. Everyone else kept their own version of the technical sheets, and faulty data slipped into quotes.

Today, Linum's rules live in one system that everyone works from. Combinations that aren't possible simply can't be configured, and nobody has to wait for one colleague or wonder which sheet is current.

In practice, getting the rules out takes a series of workshops. Engineering and sales write down the rules for one product family, test them against last year's quotes, and adjust them until the rules give the same answers your most experienced people would.

Which product family should you start with?

Once your rules are written down, they need a place where everyone can use them. Some manufacturers start with a rule-based price list or spreadsheet, others with the variant configuration in their ERP, and others with a configurator in CPQ (configure, price, quote) software.

Whichever you choose, don't start with your whole range. Begin with the product family where manual quoting costs the most and the rules are clearest, and cover what customers actually order, not every option ever sold. That bit of product standardization keeps your first rule set manageable. There's no single right order; Linum, for example, first started with a test configurator before the full rollout.

Once a product family runs on rules, the benefits continue after the quote. The configuration flows into the Bill of Materials and production without being retyped, and your distributors can order on their own.

Curious how HACO made the switch to mass customization manufacturing? Read the full story.