ABSTRACT
In the long term, it is hard for people to determine whether to provide mass-produced, standardized and low-cost products or services or to provide customized or highly differentiated products or services generated from small scale production; of course, the latter strategy has a relatively higher
1 INTRODUCTION
With the development of information technology and the Internet, the operation mode transformed from mega-marketing to one-to-one marketing to meet the increasing and changing individual requirements. Such change has posed a challenge to the traditional mass production mode, which characterizes in standardized products, unified markets and enough long product life cycles providing security for the operation of the enterprises with competitive factors like operation scale, cost and quality. In traditional enterprises, weak economies of scale means certain low-cost economies realized by mass conditions depending on single enterprise resources, while economies of scale for the industry refers to mass and low-cost economies based on single products. However, this mass production mode has a defect, i.e., the inevitable loss of customers. Under such circumstances, many traditional enterprises begin to adopt very limited customization so as to satisfy the individualized requirements of customers. In this way, they can obtain narrow economies of scope with certain flexibility, but they also have to deal with high cost, low efficiency and reduction of customer service quality, and eventually lose customers inevitably. While, for operation chain, it means a value-added chain which maximizes the overall interests of all affiliated enterprises on the chain due to the seamless joint and collaborative operation of strategic management activities such as “market management”, “technology management”, “production management” and “sales management”. The enterprises realize economies of scale under mass and
cost. In other words, people have to make a choice between highly efficient mass production and special and innovative products.
