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.

The results of the KUMAC-Project were presented on the 10th of April 2014 at the “Aachen Innovation Plattform” which was dedicated this year to the theme “The Maker Economy”. More information is available here (KUMAC & AIP) or www.aip-conference.de.

At the MCPC-Conference 2014 in Aalborg, we presented results from a study in the context of the KUMAC project. Findings reveal that a more clear structure of the service encounter of a mass customization company helps to increase service productivity. Please see all results of the study in the conference proceedings.
More information is available on the website of MCPC.
Flyer zur International Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization and Co-Creation

Now KUMAC also received considerable recognition in Australia. At the International Conference for Innovation Research “6th ISPIM Innovation Symposium” project manager Claudia Theilmann from the Fraunhofer IFF Magdeburg was honored for her excellent presentation of KUMAC results with the prestigious “OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD”. At the congress, which was held from 8th to 11th of December 2013 in Melbourne (Australia), Mrs Theilmann could convince 250 experts from over 25 countries, with her presentation.

For further information visit also http://pt-ad.pt-dlr.de/de/1407.php and http://symposium.ispim.org/index.php.

From 8th to 12th of April 2013, famous trade show HannoverMesse will take place in Hannover, Germany. Are you going to be there? Great! The KUMAC project will be there as well.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will have a large exhibition stand in a prominent spot (hall 2, stand C24) and has invited the KUMAC project group to join them. We will present the latest findings from our research project KUMAC which is being funded by the BMBF.

The objective of the KUMAC project is to develop new methods for mass customization providers in the German retail market. These methods support an increase in productivity and value creation potential of these retailers.

At HannoverMesse we will simulate the prototype of an interactive value-creation process in mass customization, using KUMAC technology to demonstrate its potential to increase both effectiveness and efficiency. In detail we will show and expain:

• The Live-Help-System connecting online-offline configuration,
• The Tablet Configuation Software,
• 3D-Scanner and Softwaretools as well as
• RFID-Technology for mass customization.

The objective of the KUMAC project is to develop new methods for mass customization providers in the German retail market, which support an increase in productivity and value creation potential of these retailers.

At the half-time conference last week in Aachen, some very interesting first results could be presented to the funding parties, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

In collaboration with industry partners three very concrete applications to enhance interaction between retail companies and customers could be demonstrated to the project consortium:

I. Tablet-Based Retail Support System

One promising approach is to have mobile hardware such as tablets available in retail stores. A tablet-based configuration support system helps retailers to organize service and interaction processes in a more productive way. Customers can design their product of choice at home, save it to their customer account and then visit a store in order to optimize the configuration. Together with the Selve AG we have developed and implemented such a tablet-based configuration support system in their store.

II. Live Online Video Support

Another approach to enhance interactive systems is to add a system to a company’s online shop that allows customers to communicate with a product specialist in real time and face to face. We are currently evaluating such a webcam based system as part of the Selve online store.

III. Advanced Customer Understanding Through CustomerDNA

This approach includes intelligent software that allows companies to better understand the customer’s needs by remembering choices that have been made during previous purchases. All information will be gathered into a highly individual set of attributes just like the very individual human DNA and used to make future shopping even more enjoyable, less time consuming and more efficient. This concept is currently being tested at Ertl/Renz in form of an on-site terminal for customer use. Once the system is fully tested and optimized, future use as an integrated online system will be possible as well.

KUMAC is a featured research project on MCKN. You will find more information about KUMAC on the dedicated project website!