Internet of Things (IoT) for Dynamic Change Management in Mass Customization

Mass customization manufacturers always find it challenging to produce high quality products at the lowest possible cost with minimal lead-time. The challenge is even more severe for these manufacturers when it comes to their survival in today’s dynamically changing market where customers drive the process by searching for the information they need in order to create their own products and services [1]. As customer-centric mass customization manufacturers, organizations should increase their change-adaptability to maintain their competitive edge in the ever-growing and everchanging market. A successful mass customization strategy should involve developing production lines that are highly agile to reconfiguration, leading towards reduced setup time in order to cope with the expected or unexpected changes to the production process. Besides this, the importance of ‘zero mistakes’ in all activities along the value-creation process should also be prioritized. Therefore, the research aims to investigate the feasibility of IoT application towards effective change implementation for mass customization in a dynamic manufacturing environment. This paper presents an architecture for dynamic change management that could provide a new competitive strategy for mass customization manufacturers. A set of IoT devices is used as illustrative examples for the dynamic change management implementation in mass customization manufacturing. The architecture of such dynamic change management is to turn operation data in dynamic form and link all together, permitting them to integrate rapidly in the most optimized combination or sequence required to perform change instantly. This architecture allows for well-informed real-time decision-making and more importantly, provides the manufacturers with the ability to predict problems before they occur.