Production Strategy Selection in the Mass Customization Era Using Analytic Network Process

The current production and market contexts are coping with the advent of the mass customization paradigm, in which customers ask for a high variety of differentiated products. To be competitive and survive in such a scenario, industrial companies need to identify the most suitable production strategy for their product families, balancing the minimization of the time-to-market from one side, and the optimization of their inbound operations from the other side. Moreover, traditional strategies such as Make-to-Stock (MTO) and Make-to-Order (MTO) are no longer enough. Hence, hybrid production strategies rose in the last years to best manage challenges and barriers of the mass customization. In such a scenario, the aim of this paper is to propose a novel decision-making structure based on the application of the Analytic Network Process (ANP) methodology to select the most suitable production strategy for product families in a reference manufacturing system. A categorization of the main criteria available in literature affecting the production strategy choice is provided, introducing some novel criteria. The proposed method is then applied to a reference case study to show its applicability in practice.