Brochure: Product individualization in retail

Offering customized products provides particularly small and medium-sized merchants the opportunity to achieve a differentiation advantages over competitors, thereby ensuring long-term success. The central element of a mass customization business model is to intensively interact with customers during the configuration of the customized product. These interaction and service processes significantly affect customers’ perceived product value. However, as these processes are oftentimes are time consuming and costly, they also impact company performance and overall success of a company. Therefore, mass customization companies need to solve a trade-off between serving customers adequately but also to achieve high levels of productivity when designing a customization process in order to be able to fully exploit the potential of mass customization. KUMAC addresses this challenge and provides instruments, approaches and methodologies that help companies mastering it. These and other results of the project were summarized in the brochure “Product Customization in Retail” (in German), which can be accessed here.