Mass-customized production in a SME network

The most promising feature of a manufacturing system oriented to mass customization is to have at disposal a layout and a governance such to allow: a) to include a new product within the family of products under manufacture; b) and to apply the required modification of the manufacturing process in front of the market-requested product innovations, in such a way to minimise the cost for product inclusion. The inclusion of a new product in a SME network implies to approach two complementary problems: 1) a post-ponement problem, that means to recognise the new characters of the innovated product such to specify its difference with respect to the set of other products already processed, and to adjoin the new working sequence in the existing processing program (to be possibly modified at least) already applied by the SME network; 2) an order-fulfillment problem, that means to include the a-priori estimated production flow required for the new product, within the programmed flows pattern in the existing SME network, by adding the minimum possible innovations to the network itself. The paper will discuss the proposed solution phases, and illustrate a set of integrated procedure to be applied in order to obtain a mass-customisation strategy of practical utilisation for managing SME networks.