Mass Customization: Customizing for the Human Aspect of Operations Management

There is a tendency that the consumer market is getting more and more individualized as an effect of people craving customized products, and producers seeing this as an opportunity for earning more money on a product or service customized to a customer's specific needs. This customization increases the complexity tied to the product, not necessarily for the consumer, but typically for the producer. As the complexity of products are moved closer to the producer, the job of producing and/or assembling the end-product gets more complicated. For instance, a higher degree of flexibility will be needed, if compared to traditional mass production where one typically produces in bulk. This will again demand more from the organization and its employees in form of more responsive systems, machines, processes, and not least employees. In this paper we suggest a self-assessment form to measure the individual job satisfaction at the shopfloor and take one step in the direction of customizing the daily work of employees in mass customizing companies.