Profitability and Mass Personalization: Automakers Can Now Achieve Both
Today’s consumers increasingly want personalized products — and automobiles are no exception. For automotive manufacturers the demand for personalization means more vehicle variations and a technology ecosystem that powers this customer experience from show room to shop floor. Build-to-order capabilities are possibly the most critical aspect to do this profitably and at scale. While it’s easy for car manufacturers to advertise their capabilities to quickly deliver personalized vehicles, it’s much harder to achieve mass customization on a day-to-day basis.
The answer lies in optimizing the complex automotive supply chain, which produces both individual components and finished assemblies. The end-to-end manufacturing process must be carefully orchestrated to sequence individual orders, and the needed parts, so that final assembly of customized products can occur fluidly, seamlessly and — let’s not forget — profitably.