A Preliminary Model for Delayed Product Differentiation Towards Mass Customization

In the recent years, the diversity in customer requirements asks industrial companies to move from mass production to mass customization, overcoming the traditional strategy of realizing a large volume of a single product in favor of the manufacturing of multiple product variants matching different customer needs. In such a scenario, traditional production strategies such as Make to Stock (MTS) and Make to Order (MTO) show some limitations, leading to the advent of new hybrid production strategies. The Delayed Product Differentiation (DPD) is one of the most relevant, which attempts to join the dual needs of high variety and quick customer response time by using the so-called product platforms. This working paper proposes a preliminary indicator to assess the similarity among a set of parts, i.e., product variants, according to their production cycle, acting as a first criterion to assess the feasibility of implementing the DPD strategy. The application of the proposed indicator to an operative industrial instance showcases its effectiveness to suggesting to the company whether to implement the DPD or to using traditional production strategies.