Mass customization will entail businesses tailoring product functionality, design, and service to satisfy individual customer requirements, but making differentiated products at high speed and in high volumes in order to keep unit costs to a minimum. Manufacturers will have to accelerate flexibility through continuous innovation and shorter production runs that can accommodate changing and more specialized customer requirements together with shorter product life cycles.

Mass customization will require further changes within the business of manufacturing:

• Information systems that can quickly identify customer specifications, turn them into work orders, and create pull systems throughout supply chains and production processes, that meet both customer demands and manufacturing requirements;
• Agile production facilities that can rapidly be reconfigured to produce different products or product variations with minimal changeover time;
• Standard product platforms and easily interchangeable and compatible product parts;
• Process-based quality control and certification systems;
• Individualized tracking and materials management systems;
• Lean, just-in-time supply chains;
• Low-cost logistics infrastructure; and,
• Customer services that cover the life cycle of products, from design through to financing, after-sales service, maintenance, recycling and disposal.

Environmental Sustainability

In the future, manufacturers will be operating in a world of increasingly severe resource and energy constraints.

They will also be expected by the public, governments, and other stakeholders to exercise responsibility for the way they interact with the environment. Environmental sustainability will be a critical driver of costs and a key operating principle in product design, engineering, and life-cycle management, the development and use of production and process technologies, as well as in the management of energy and natural resources.