Mass Customization – Parlaying Customer Experience into Agile Production

This project is centered around a mass customization project at Lego Systems, and builds on the notion that an organization can learn, and thereby improve its own production practices, by letting customers try their hand at constructing, developing and building their own, individually customized products. Over the course of the project, the researcher has acted as a facilitator in the process of developing and implementing a new business platform, Lego Direct. In addition to giving customers the chance to function as a virtual R & D executive, Lego Direct makes it possible for customers to exchange ideas and experiences with one another, e.g. by acting as an arena for inter-child play. In short, the progression from Mass Production to Mass Customization is the focal point of this dissertation. The researcher will seek to document and analyse the transformations this progression has effected within the Lego organization and, in broad terms, analyze and discuss the elements essential to the processes of developing and implementing an innovative business platform based on Mass Customization. Each aspect involved in these processes will be considered ? from information systems and learning to production and logistics ? with special attention devoted to the extra dimension which the incorporation of customer experience derived from Mass Customization can add to the sum total of an organization?s activities. CIP project group: Mark W. Hansen (Ph.D. Researcher), Professor John Johansen (Primary advisor) Case company: Lego Systems A/S Project duration: 1999 ? summer 2003.