Mass Customization

Digital twins connect physical and digital systems, furthering efficiency, enabling predictive maintenance, and allowing the production of more customized products. Despite these advantages, challenges such as high costs, data synchronization, and security risks hinder widespread adoption. This article explores the potential of digital twins and examines key barriers to integration and implementation, also considering some industrial applications including additive manufacturing as a relevant use case.

GloNet is a research project co-funded by the European Commission which aims in supporting small and medium sizes enterprises to collaborate in the frame of virtual organisations. The cloud-based GloNet platform supports the efficient organisation of business processes involving suppliers and customers in the product lifecycle. The solution will allow for the maintenance of complex, individualised, and extended products. This article presents a use case from the solar ranch, summarises process requirements and elaborates on the architecture and important features of the GloNet platform.

The possibilities and limitations of conventional manufacturing processes strongly determine the design process and often lead to devices and products that do not fully exploit their theoretical potentials, e.g. their resistance to flow. Laser Additive Manufacturing is a manufacturing process to produce parts out of metallic powder materials. The technology is on the threshold to industrial maturity and has the potential to enable novel approaches for production and engineering. Thus, a shift from production-oriented design towards a design-oriented selection of the manufacturing process is possible.

The automotive industry faces substantial challenges: a difficult market environment, increasingly complex technologies and shorter product life cycles characterize the industry. Modularization has been considered a promising remedy to help solving some of these demanding problems. Rewards of the application of modular systems are expected from various different sides. So far, however, its implications for production have rarely been discussed. This paper presents three production concepts for modular pro-ducts and their respective advantages and disadvantages. The integration of the production perspective allows more prudent strategic decisions regarding modularization.

The dynamism in industrial markets and the increasing competition due to globalization and technological equivalence forces companies of the capital goods sector to rethink their business models. In this context customer solutions are considered as trendsetting. However, the individual solution of a customer’s problem poses a major challenge in terms of transforming from a product-centric mindset to a supplier of customized solution. This article analyzes to what extend the concept of mass customization can give incentives in order to successfully create and provide customer solutions.

The processes for the procurement of individual components are coined by a high grade of complexity. The reason is that an individual component often cannot be identified by a unique item number. In point of fact an additional detailed description for each individual part is necessary. As a rule the needed descriptions cannot be created in an ERP system directly which causes an additional effort concerning the distribution of the individualization information to all suppliers that are involved in the manufacturing process. The following article shows how the distribution can be configured in an effective and transparent way within a supplier network.

Today, in many industries the customer demands on products and services change rapidly. Most customers expect individualized products at simultaneously low costs and delivery times. Therefore, many enterprises attempt the strategy of Mass Customization (MC). The result is a variant-rich production process which causes complex prerequisites for the enterprises. This contribution shows an infrastructure for the transfer of customer specifications in the MC.