Manufacturing process reengineering for mass customization by using flexibility analysis

It is a trend to implement mass customization to meet customer demands and win the global competition. To implement mass customization, today's manufacturing process should be reengineered. It is believed that manufacturing process reengineering is a highly risk job. Flexibility in manufacturing systems has been recognized as one of the vital competitive priorities in manufacturing strategy, and should be taken into consideration in manufacturing process reengineering to reduce the risk. Thus, flexibility analysis can be used as a tool in the manufacturing process reengineering. In this paper we develop a measurement of flexibility in manufacturing systems for customization. This measurement measures not only the impact of manufacturing technology hardware but also the impact of the product design and process design, so it can be used as guide in manufacturing reengineering for mass customization. A case study is presented to show the use of the proposed approach.