Study Of Mass Customization, Postponement Strategy

Nowadays, with the development of the world economy, Demands of customers are become diversified. More and more customers have specific needs on products. In order to meet the customers' needs, lots of companies are tried to change their way of production. But the way of customization will prolong the lead time and increase the cost. In recent 15 years, Supply Chain Management theory and Information technology are quickly developed, that made the Mass customization possible. On one hand, this way of production meet the customers' personalized demands. On the other hand, it effectively controls the cost increase. Postponement is one of the most important strategies in mass customization, and the core factor is the position of customer Order Decoupling Point (CODP).The paper focuses on the postponement strategy and more details are as followed:Chapter one focuses on the research status of the mass customization and postponement strategy. Then, we find the existing problems of the research, and summarized the frame of the whole paper.Chapter two focuses on the indicators that influence the practice of postponement are discussed. The paper classified the postponement strategy and summarized 16 indicators that influenced the practice of the postponement strategy. And then factor analysis is used to find analysis the indicators.Chapter three focuses on the position of CODP. In different industries, the positions of CODP are different. Usually, we believe that when CODP is close to the end of supply chain, it is more suitable to use mass production than mass customization for the product, and vise versa. In this chapter, a mathematic model is also built to find the optimal location of the CODP, and then the sensitive analysis is used in the model.Chapter four focuses on the risk of the application of the postponement. In this chapter, the origin of the risk and ways to evaluate the risk are discussed, and some methods that prevent the risk are proposed.Chapter five is the summary of the whole paper, and the outlook of the future of the postponement strategy.