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( Mass customization)
Mass customization, in marketing, manufacturing, and management, is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output. Those systems combine the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization. The concept of mass customization is attributed to Stan Davis in Future Perfect [1] and was defined by Tseng and Jiao (2001, p.&_160;685) as "producing goods and services to meet individual customer's needs with near mass production efficiency". Kaplan and Haenlein (2006, pp.&_160;168–182) concurred, calling it "a strategy that creates value by some form of company-customer interaction at the fabrication / assembly stage of the operations level to create customized products with production cost and monetary price similar to those of mass-produced products". He suggested a business model, "the 8.5-figure-path", a process going from invention to mass production to continuous improvement to mass customization and back to invention. Many implementations of mass customization are operational today, such as software-based product configurators which make it possible to add and/or change functionalities of a core product or to build fully custom enclosures from scratch. This degree of mass customization has only seen limited adoption, however. If an enterprise's marketing department offers individual products (atomic market fragmentation) it doesn't often mean that a product is produced individually, but rather that similar variants of the same mass produced item are available.
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