Why I Wrote A Book About Implementing Mass Customization

The following is excerpted from David J. Gardner’s book, Mass Customization: An Enterprise-Wide Business Strategy, published in May 2009:

I’ve been helping manufacturers implement mass customization since the early 1980s—before the expression “mass customization” was coined by Stan Davis in his best-selling book Future Perfect back in 1987. There has been much written about mass customization as a high-level business strategy but far less written about actually implementing mass customization within a manufacturing company.

Some would suggest that you merely need to purchase product configurator software and, voilà, you’re in the mass customization business. Hogwash! This would be tantamount to suggesting one can write a great sales letter merely because you have Microsoft Word.

Mass customization is not a departmental challenge nor is it an IT challenge. Mass customization must be approached holistically across the enterprise and even out to the extended enterprise to your dealers and customers.

This is why I wrote the book.

David J. Gardner, Mass Customization Expert