Mass Customization and Customer Centricity: In Honor of the Contributions of Cipriano Forza

ISBN-13: 9783031097812 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Thomas Aichner; Fabrizio Salvador

Opis

This book honors the contributions and career of Cipriano Forza, Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of Academic Journal Guide (ABS), an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, where he curated a special issue on “Coordinating Product Design, Process Design, and Supply Chain Design Decisions”. As one of the world’s foremost researchers in the area of mass customization and operations management, Prof. Forza published more than 200 scientific articles with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. For his groundbreaking work, he received several awards, including the Dr. Theo Williamson Award for Excellence (1997), best paper awards by Production Planning and Control (2005) and the Journal of Operations Management (2006), the Harry Boer Highly Commended Award (2016), and the EurOMA Fellowship Awards (2021).Leading researchers and practitioners that have been working with the honoree contributed a broad range of findings from conceptual and empirical research about mass customization and personalization to this book. The individual chapters take a customer centric view on the challenges and opportunities of product and service customization from an operations management, information technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and organizational perspective. The authors explore key ideas, current developments as well as future research directions.

Spis treści

Editorial

Thomas Aichner
Fabrizio Salvador

About This Book

Introduction, explanation why this book was written (collection of contributions from leading mass customization researchers to celebrate Professor Cipriano Forza’s 60^th birthday and his career as a world-leading expert in mass customization), chapter outline and short summary of main contributions.

Laudatio

Roberto Filippini

The Academic Story of Cipriano Forza: A Brief Overview

(First paragraph preview of the Laudatio): Late afternoon, June 1992, Monte Berico. There are only three people in the Operations Management Lab at the Institute of Management and Engineering: Cipriano, another PhD student, and me. Cipriano is hunched over his keyboard - the data he’s working on for his doctoral thesis isn’t quite adding up the way he’d like it to. He’s been sitting there for weeks. His mobile rings and his eyes widen when he sees his wife’s name appear on the display: “Where are you?” “I’m... on the way home...” “You said you’d be back early!” Cipriano, abruptly jolted back into the real world, stands up and motions us - as we attempt to stifle our laughs - to be quiet... “I’ll be home in a few minutes.” He sits back down and continues to tap away at his computer, the phone call already a distant memory. Sometimes, a person’s passion for research is all-consuming. This comedic episode recurred on several occasions, each of which has been etched into my memory.

1

Alessio Trentin
Fabrizio Salvador

Form Postponement Types and Market Contingencies: Toward an Isomorphism of Mass-Customization Strategies and Form Postponement Types

Key words: form postponement, operations management, strategies

2

Fabrizio Salvador

The Ghost in the Machine: A Multi-Method Exploration of the Role of Individuals in the Simultaneous Pursuit of Flexibility and Efficiency

Operations Management research has been dominated by the quest for organizational or technological approaches to building flexibility and efficiency into a firm’s operations, paying little attention to the role of human agency—the capacity of individuals to affect the organization through their purposeful action. We address this gap in the literature by means of a multi-method, empirical theory-building study that investigates how managers and employees within an organization cope with the efficiency-flexibility trade-off. We generate a preliminary set of propositions through an interview study involving 46 subject matter experts from Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. We subsequently re-examine these propositions using a survey-based triangulation study involving 276 managers operating in the same five countries. We provide a more general rationale for our propositions by borrowing the attention-based view of the firm as well as theoretical contributions from the organizational memory and organizational improvisation literatures. We propose that people operating within an organization’s workflow contribute to reducing the efficiency-flexibility trade-off by supporting the execution of three tasks that cannot be fully codified “a-priori”, which we label prospecting, blueprinting and patching. Additionally, we find that the abilities supporting the execution of these tasks must be distributed across the workflow functions for efficiency and flexibility to be obtained. Finally, in contrast with extant literature, our findings downplay the role of production workers in the attainment of efficiency and flexibility. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for the literature on manufacturing flexibility, ambidexterity and operations strategy.

Key words: mass customization, individualism, operations management

3

Lars Hvam
A. M. Staskiewicz

Niels H. Mortensen
Anders Haug

The Role of SKU Management in Product Variety Reduction Projects

To address customers’ increasing demands for specialized products, manufacturers are offering an increasing amount of standard and customized products. For many manufacturers, this has resulted in uncontrollable product proliferation and a struggle to manage their product variety. To address this problem, many manufacturers have initiated product variety reduction programs. Unfortunately, many such initiatives fail to achieve the intended financial benefits. While the existing literature provides numerous studies and methods for product variety reduction (PVR), research investigating the link between PVR projects and SKU (stock keeping unit) management is scant. However, there are reasons to believe that this link could partially explain why some PVR projects fail. This assumption was investigated by studying an unsuccessful PVR project at an international world-leading hearing healthcare company. In the case studied, initially, the project appeared to provide significant reductions in inventories. However, a deeper analysis revealed that these stock reduction potentials appeared significantly larger than they were because of untransparent SKU management. Specifically, the analyses found that approximately 20% of the hearing devices in the product portfolio were associated with multiple SKUs and that the inventory-related benefits from the PVR would be minimal. On this basis, a model describing three levels of experienced product variety and two types of product variety discrepancies is developed.

Key words: variety management, operations management, product variety, mass customization

4

Igor Kalinic

Internationalization of Production in SMEs: Organizational Challenges and Strategic Opportunities

Due to the changes occurred in the last decades an increasing number of SMEs is presented with the opportunity to internationalize also the upstream activities. This exploratory study analyses the consequences of the internationalization of production on SMEs. We propose to focus the future research on both the organizational changes that are stimulated by this kind of internationalization and on the consequent impact on the firms’ competitiveness. The results suggests that internationalization of production is challenging. SMEs need to adapt to the increased complexity; however, this provides them with the opportunity  to develop sustainable competitive advantages over competitors that stay local.

Key words: SME, internationalization, mass customization

5

Elisa Perin
Alessio Trentin
Enrico Sandrin

Integrating Mass Customization and Environmental Management: An Organizational-Capability Perspective

Key words: mass customization, environmental management, organizational capability

6

Paul Blazek

Creating Customization Experiences: The Evolution of Product Configurators

A systematic review of the technical, functional and behavioral development of online sales configurators. The focus of this chapter is on how to create an individual, custom experience or in other words, how to customize the customization experience.

Key words: online sales configurators, product configuration, mass customization

7

Abdel Monim Shaltoni
Thomas Aichner

Customized Digital Marketing Communications

This chapter is about customization in digital marketing practice, specifically digital marketing communications. Specifically, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview on marketing decision making in a digital environment, for example e-commerce, and outlines how companies can and should use data to customize communication with customers in order to increase efficiency and return on investment.

Key words: digital marketing, online marketing, e-commerce, marketing communication

8

Paolo Coletti
Thomas Aichner

Online Shopping Preferences in Mass Customization: A Comparison Between 2008 and 2021

Mass customization has become important to business because of the difficulties for customers in finding what they want despite an increase in product variety for many categories over the past decades. The emergence of modern technologies in production and communication, however, allows companies to offer customized products and services without relinquishing economies of scale. The advent of web interfaces has finally given the opportunity to achieve completely the involvement of the customer in the product’s entire design process. In this chapter, a survey on more than 500 European customers from 2008 is replicated in 2021, again surveying more than 500 European customers. The results show a declining willingness of customers to compromise on the issue of suitability of products to their personal needs and preferences, the possibility for companies to break brand loyalty through mass customization and the influence of immediate availability, delivery time and price on the customer’s willingness to take part in the co-creation process of products.

Key words: online behavior, online shopping, e-commerce, mass customization

9

Chiara Grosso

Enhancing Digital Social Interaction While Shopping via Online Sales Configurators

E-commerce is taking a more social, creative, and collaborative approach with customers in online marketplaces that engender social commerce (SC), an online commercial application that implements social-technology features to enhance customer involvement at different levels of the online shopping experience. SC is new but fast growing—it is spreading to the majority of e-commerce activities. Companies that sell customizable products through online-sales configurators (OSCs) can start implementing SC using mass-customization systems that incorporate social features through social product-customization systems. Complementing an OSC with social software (SSW) enrich the configurator environment with a highly interactive features to support user’s digital social interactions. Studies on social recommendation posited that the potential of social relations can be exploited to complement recommender systems implemented in e-commerce environments by collecting social interactive feedback while users are shopping online (e.g., ratings, clicks, and favorites). Such arguments are based on the likelihood that individuals will seek suggestions from friends before making a purchase decision and that their friends consistently provide trustworthy recommendations during ongoing product configuration. Although recent studies have addressed OSC-SSW connections, prior research on social customization systems has not explored to what extent social-interaction features that are currently combined into OSCs respond to users’ actual need to engage in human-assisted interactions with their contacts during their configuration experiences. The present chapter seeks to further the debate on social product customization systems by providing insight on implementing interactive features that respond properly to configurator user demand for digital social interaction.

Key words: social shopping, social media, online-sales configurators, mass customization

10

Thomas Aichner
Michael Nippa
Amanda Brutto

Racial Similarity Effects in Advertising. A Deep Dive in Mass Customization Industries

Diversity is a concept that is becoming increasingly influential in both, economic and spheres. It encompasses respect of individual differences along different dimensions. This research paper undertakes an exploration of the use of diverse portrayals in advertising along the dimension of race. Specifically, it aims to study what impact the consideration of race in advertisements has on consumer perceived value of a product, specifically in mass customization industries. Data was collected through an online survey where 559 Italian women evaluated one of the four fictitious advertisements prepared for a customizable shampoo which were manipulated through the use of women of varied racial composition. The PERVAL scale was used to assess customers’ perceptions of the value of a mass product along the functional, emotional and social dimensions and two single-item questions were used to assess the constructs of willingness to customize and willingness to pay a higher price for the customized product.  The results demonstrate that race has an impact on consumer’s perceived value only when there is no similarity effect from advertisements featuring different race models. The less similar the models to the customer are, the less value is perceived from the consumer. In contrast, there is no impact of race on willingness to customize and pay a higher price for a customizable product. Nonetheless, this study can serve as a starting point for further research on the impact of race and enriches the current research in the field of mass customization.

Key words: advertising, diversity, perceived value, willingness to buy, willingness to pay, mass customization

11

Thomas Aichner
Gotthard Schöpf

Case Study: Leitner Ropeways – Customization is part of our standards

This case study is intended to serve as a basis for class discussion in undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate studies in the area of management engineering, management, marketing, market research, B2B marketing, entrepreneurship and innovation. Students are presented with a real-life case from the company Leitner, an international B2B company selling highly customized ropeways solutions. In addition to the case, teaching notes with suggested discussion topics and possible solutions are provided.

Key words:

Bonus

Zoran Anišić
Nikola Suzić
Nenad Medić

Retrospective of the MCP-CE conferences in the period of 2004-2020

The chapter presents a retrospective of the International Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization – Community of Europe (MCP-CE) in the period from 2004 to 2020. The present chapter includes an overview of the structure of conference participants, main conference topics in a given year and other significant results for the development of Mass Customization and Personalization. We believe that the MCP-CE conference has made a significant contribution to the development and implementation of customization and personalization in both European and global settings.

O autorze

Thomas Aichner is an Associate Professor of Marketing who held academic positions at leading Universities and Business Schools in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Saudi Arabia. He received a joint Ph.D. in Management Engineering from the University of Padova (Vicenza, Italy) and a Dr. rer. pol. in Business Administration from ESCP Business School (Berlin, Germany), with the special mention of Doctor Europaeus. His research is focused on country of origin, mass customization, digital management, and disability/inclusion.

Fabrizio Salvador is Professor of Operations Management and Vice-Rector for Applied Research at IE University (Madrid, Spain). Dr. Salvador holds a Ph.D. in Operations Management and MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Padova (Vicenza, Italy). He has been visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Faculty Research Associate at Arizona State University. His award-winning research is published in various top journals, where he has also held multiple editorial leadership positions. He has received the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar award as a leading management scholar.

Blurb

This book honors the contributions and remarkable career of Cipriano Forza, Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of Academic Journal Guide (ABS), an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal, and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management. As one of the world’s foremost researchers in the area of mass customization and operations management, Professor Forza published more than 200 scientific articles with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. For his groundbreaking work, he received several awards, including the Dr. Theo Williamson Award for Excellence (1997), best paper awards by Production Planning and Control (2005) and the Journal of Operations Management (2006), the Harry Boer Highly Commended Award (2016), and the EurOMA Fellowship Awards (2021).

Leading researchers and practitioners that have been working with the honoree contributed a broad range of findings from conceptual and empirical research about mass customization and personalization to this book. The individual chapters take a customer-centric view on the challenges and opportunities of product and service customization from an operations management, information technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and organizational perspective.

Thomas Aichner is an Associate Professor of Marketing who held academic positions at leading Universities and Business Schools in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Saudi Arabia. He received a joint Ph.D. in Management Engineering from the University of Padova (Vicenza, Italy) and a Dr. rer. pol. in Business Administration from ESCP Business School (Berlin, Germany), with the special mention of Doctor Europaeus. His research is focused on country of origin, mass customization, digital management, and disability/inclusion.

Fabrizio Salvador is Professor of Operations Management and Vice-Rector for Applied Research at IE University (Madrid, Spain). Dr. Salvador holds a Ph.D. in Operations Management and MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Padova (Vicenza, Italy). He has been visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Faculty Research Associate at Arizona State University. His award-winning research is published in various top journals, where he has also held multiple editorial leadership positions. He has received the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar award as a leading management scholar.