Form postponement has been widely acknowledged as one of the main avenues to mitigate the adverse effects of product proliferation or customization on operational performance. As it often happens with long debated concepts, the proposed definitions of form postponement sometimes display...

When a firm offers customized products, variants and options may end up confusing the customer, instead of increasing sales. Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology made available a class of software products, often termed as "product configurators", which appears to...

Offering to customers a high variety of products while guaranteeing competitive prices and reasonable delivery times is an ever-increasing necessity for companies. At the same time, the growing technological content of products contributes further to this complexity, introducing new challenges...

Form postponement is an operations design principle requiring that changes in product form occur at the latest possible point in time along a manufacturing and distribution process. The rich literature on form postponement almost ignores its market implications and often provides seemingly...

Operations management literature defines form postponement as the deferment of product differentiation activities through changes in the architecture and/or the manufacturing and distribution process of a product family. We contend that when form postponement is meant to reduce the risk and...

The present paper reports preliminary observations from a longitudinal case study of the Lawn Mowers & Garden Tractors business unit of Deere & Company. This business unit is interested in analyzing the applicability of a Build-To-Order strategy for its business. By analyzing the problems...

Purpose: The development of mass-customization capability (MCC) is crucial for a growing number of manufacturing firms nowadays and presents great challenges, especially in the area of operations management. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into which individual competencies...

Purpose: The operational capability of mass customization (MC) allows consumers to obtain products tailored to their idiosyncratic needs. This study aims to provide insights into the potential of this capability for countering a product's liability of foreignness – the negative effect of the...

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the use of the knowledge management (KM) perspective for configuration projects. Configuration projects implement configurators as information technology systems that help companies manage the specification process of customised products. An effective method...