Mitchell M. Tseng and Frank T. Piller

20     Distributed Demand Flow Customization
       

Alexander Tsigkas1, Erik de Jongh2, Agis Papantoniou3 and Vassilis Loumos3
1 FlexCom. AT&P Ltd., Athens, Greece
2 Tecnomatix Technologies Ltd., Herzeliya, Israel
3 National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

This chapter will present new collaborative tools and methodologies enabling the rapid development of new product platforms and their corresponding manufacturing processes. The intended development cycle times are months for automobiles and computers, weeks for consumer electronics products, and days for many others. The new battlefield of corporate competition is the capability and speed to create and transform "new" knowledge into personalized products and services. Lean and flow enterprises have the best chances for winning this battle. The proposed tools provide the missing link for the development of products and processes for mass customization. To address this challenge an integrating approach in product and process development is presented. The objective is to boost the ability in sensing quickly changing customer value requirements and expectations followed by the capability to transform these requirements and expectations rapidly in a variety of new product platforms and services. Doing so we will introduce a new key factor to measure the speed of an enterprise to turn customer demand into value-adding mass customized products. A continuous increase in this factor will lead an enterprise towards continuous invention which is translated into the speed to systematically and continuously mass customize products and introducing new ones. We call this enterprise an entropy enterprise.