Configuring products to address the customization-responsiveness squeeze: A survey of management issues and opportunities

Many companies are currently facing the "customization-responsiveness squeeze", i.e. the need to simultaneously offer their customers tailored products while ensuring short delivery times. A possible approach proposed by design theory and artificial intelligence research is one of configuring products, i.e. to constrain the set of potential product variants offered to the customer to the possible combinations of pre-designed components. While product configuration has been widely explored from a strictly technical standpoint, we have only anecdotal evidence of the managerial issues arising when the customization-responsiveness squeeze is addressed by configuring products. The present study pursues this research opportunity by means of a hybrid quantitative-qualitative research design. The quantitative part of the research explores he issue under investigation by means of a survey on a sample of 122 companies located in Northern Italy and facing the customization-responsiveness squeeze. The qualitative part of the research consists of a set of inter-views with key informants performed ex post in selected companies within the sample. The findings indicate that, although responding companies tend to rely on product configuration to customize their products, they are presented with a set of related difficulties as well: inadequate product information supply to the sales office, excess of repetitive activities within the technical office and high rate of configuration errors in production. Theoretical elaboration of the empirical evidence suggests that, in order to reap the full potential advantages of product configuration, changes in the organization and support systems to the order acquisition and fulfillment process are needed.