ABSTRACT

In today’s highly competitive business environment, activities for serving customers have to be performed both efficiently and effectively-they have to be organized around a customer-centric supply and demand chain (Piller and Tseng 2010). Since the early 1990s, mass customization has emerged as an idea for achieving precisely this objective. Following Joseph Pine (1993), we define mass customization as “developing, producing, marketing, and delivering affordable goods and services with enough variety and customization that nearly everyone finds exactly what they want.” In other words, the goal is to provide customers what they want, when they want it. Hence, companies offering mass customization are becoming customer-centric enterprises (Tseng and Piller 2003), organizing all of their value creation activities around interactions with individual customers.