Mass Customization

Customizable products and services are becoming more and more of a matter of course. To give traders and manufacturers the ability to react perfectly to the trend toward mass customization, WEISS develops flexible solutions for profitable manufacturing up to batch size 1.

Customization has been considered a megatrend for years. It disrupts consumer behavior and poses a challenge to the trade and industry alike. In the consumer markets, this message arrived a long time ago. Anyone who wants to can compose their personal granola mix or combine the materials and colors of their new sports shoes on the Internet with a few clicks. In the space of just a few years, a completely new market has emerged for vendors who specialize in mass producing customized products – from tailored shirts and hair care products with combinable ingredients to lipsticks with a personalized engraving.

In the industrial sector, the situation is very similar. Customers are increasingly demanding customized products and solutions. However, until now, very few companies have been able to manufacture single units at the price of mass goods. According to a study by technology consultant company Staufen, around 14 percent of the surveyed companies in Germany are capable of profitable production with batch size 1. Almost half of them want to catch up and switch to custom manufacturing within the next ten years because they believe that the transition to custom production is an important strategic topic for their company and the sector as a whole. If you take a closer look at what the increase in customization means to our society, what reinforces the trend and how it affects purchasing behavior, this assessment seems fairly accurate.

Digitalization accelerates the trend toward customization
Individuality is freedom of choice in action. The greater the freedom of choice, the further the process of customization will advance. In the 20th century, the focus was taking on more individual responsibility and achieving autonomy, but today customization is primarily synonymous with the desire for agency, self-optimization and uniqueness.

In the constant work on one’s own person, consumption plays a key role. After all, purchase decisions are made dependent on the extent to which they help to achieve personal goals and differentiate oneself from others. Today’s industrially produced mass products are hardly able to fulfill these objectives since they are available everywhere and affordable for the majority of consumers. As a consequence, for years traditional mass markets have increasingly experienced a split into segments with customized offers.

A key driver of this change is the digitalization of all areas of life. This not only ensures enormous market transparency and diversity. It also generates and expands the desire for customized offers. Netflix, maxdome, Facebook and Spotify show each user completely personalized content in order to ensure an optimal user experience, while the reach of the traditional mass media has diminished year after year. At the same time, there are online configurations for optimizing offers in accordance with personal preferences – for product types ranging from cars to financial services.

As a result, perfect products or adaptable ones are increasingly becoming the norm, while competitive products without any customization options will be meaningless in the long term. They no longer fit the new purchase behavior of customers, who are geared towards the maximization of individual benefits.

Major opportunities for manufacturers – and a major challenge
Of course, the megatrend toward customization is not only driven by technology, consumers and buyers. Manufacturers also use the development and production of customizable solutions in order to increase their own competitive ability and develop new business potential. Customization offers them the opportunity to:

• differentiate themselves apart from the competition through a unique selling point and avoid the commodity trap

• dampen the price sensitivity of potential customers and make price comparisons more difficult

• increase customer satisfaction and loyalty through data-based orientation to individual preferences

• leverage the optimized supply-demand fit as a door-opener for new business and innovative business models

• leverage the optimized supply-demand fit as a door-opener for new business and innovative business models

This sounds good, but there’s a huge hook. In order to manufacture custom solutions, technology and innovation are in demand because the prevailing static production lines are not suitable for batch size 1 as part of customized mass production. Instead, smart factories in which production processes can be flexibly adjusted in real time are needed. A high level of standardization and automation are decisive.

Further, all system components must be able to communicate with each other in real time to ensure that the required parts are available at the right station in the correct quantity and at the right time. On the other hand, this only functions if suppliers are integrated into the ERP system of the manufacturer. This is the prerequisite for supplying the necessary raw materials just in time.

The alternative to the smart factory: soft customization in customer service
Those who want to achieve this goal without a smart factory have two alternatives. First, the modularization concept offers a cost-efficient opportunity to fulfill individual customer wishes. Second, customization must not necessarily be achieved in production in the form of “hard customization.” It can also be soft and take place in customer service.

Solutions for batch size 1
WEISS has been aware of the trend toward customization for several years. The automation experts are meeting the challenge with various activities that increase the customization level of proprietary solutions and, in turn, of customer applications as well.

They include a dedicated modularization strategy in conjunction with the development of value-added services that help users to flexibly adapt systems to the everyday demands of production. In other areas as well, batch size 1 is already a reality for customers and potential customers. For example, the online configurator from WEISS can be used to individualize rotary indexing tables, which will be usable in the next expansion stage together with a digital twin and apps for value-added services such as virtual commissioning and order-related control.

Another building block in the direction of individualization is the future expansion of the customer portal "WEISS World" into a customer suite with personalized information and a rapidly growing range of customer-oriented services.

Mass customization requires motion
WEISS is an enabler for batch size 1 with its components as well. As mechatronics systems, the components can be controlled and prepared with relevant software modules to make them easy to use, for example. “For complex functional and application-related requirements, WEISS offers ready-to-function sub-systems and sub-assemblies with its robots, axis and transfer systems. They can be flexibly configured and individually programmed. Saving time and money in plant engineering, during conversions and when using the system is a market and customer requirement that we practically have to meet on a daily basis,” said Fabian Hübner, Director Global Product Management. A current example is the DR delta robot with which consumer products or other products can be easily realized because it can be used for more than one process step, including packaging, assembly and sorting.

According to Fabian Hübner, these systems play a decisive role in the customized production of tomorrow: “Batch size 1 can only function if it is exactly as cost-efficient as series production. As a consequence, we are increasing the level of automation further. Yet at the same time we must and will reduce its complexity because there are still too many steps in the production process that do not create value.”

To change this, in Hübner’s opinion, a range of flexible and, above all, mobile process steps are required: “This is our point of departure. After all, the contribution that WEISS makes is our ability to map the required motions in 2D, 3D, 4D, circular or lengthwise and flexibly up to batch size 1. Not only that: we make them recyclable and serviceable as well. This is our mission.”