Practical Research On Postponement Strategy For Mass Customization And Its Applications

With the global economic integration and industry competition, consumer demand shifted gradually from single standard to personal diversity and more and more consumer demand for personalized products, at the same time, rapid shortening product life cycles and greatly improved customers requirements for delivery of service level and lead time has turned the competition between enterprises be based on time and the customer's competition. In this competitive environment, the pursuit for low cost and rapid response to customer demand in mass customization production methods is widely used. Postponement is considered as a strategy to enhance the agility for strategic technology for companies, also to help enterprises achieve cost-effectively and effective mass customization approach.To be able to apply postponement strategy to more sectors, this paper presents a simple and effective postponement strategy options for specific problems, to choose between the various optimal postponement strategies. Meanwhile, the core issue for the postponement strategy is Customer Order Decoupling Point (CODP point) positioning problems, and according to the production practice, this study has established an quantitative decision model based on the basic model and considering the time value of money added to the total costs.Firstly, based on the relevant theory and standing in the position of manufacturers, we classify the postponement strategy into the design postponement, procurement postponement, production postponement and logistics postponement. Then we analyze the determinants how to effect the options for the various postponement strategies, and propose options for the various postponement strategies according to the characteristics of the four determinants including the products, markets, technical processes and the time value of money.Secondly, standing in the position of manufacturers, when it comes to customer order decoupling point (CODP) location decision, there were queues basic model of M\ M\1. We add the time value of money factors into the total cost account and then build mass customization process CODP location decision model to calculate the optimum point of CODP.Finally, from the perspective of enterprise applications, we consider an automotive seat manufacturing company as the research object, and apply the proposed postponement strategy options and CODP location decision model to the automotive seat manufacturing company to make the postponement strategy options and the best CODP point verification.There are 12 figures,5 tables and 50 references in the paper.