Reconfiguring product development process in auto industries for mass customisation

Mass customisation is today's reality in global business environment. Manufacturing firms are now in tremendous pressure to produce custom-built products/services to stay in global completion. The principle of mass customisation lies in maximising the correlations among manufacturer's technical capabilities to target market niches and in a timely manner to meet diverse customers' needs. To capture the target market niches, manufacturers need to concentrate on appropriate developmental technologies to keep production costs low, quality high and quick response. Nowadays customers' desires are to have their products quicker than before and placing an order in most convenient ways. This paper demonstrates how both product and production configuration system can be applied in global auto industries for placing an order to customised products more conveniently and efficiently. A case example from Volvo company trucks configurator is provided, which allows the integration of citarasa configurator to the basic product and production configuration system.