Authors: Lars-Erik Gadde; Peter Fredriksson
This paper deals with customisation, i.e. firms? abilities to tailor their products to theindividual customer’s needs within reasonable cost and time limits. The aim of the paper is toexplore the characteristics of the evolving activity structures for customisation and build-toorderproduction. The paper begins with a framework for analysing activity structures innetworks. This framework is applied on the production and logistics network of the build-toorderproduction at Volvo Cars? plant in Gothenburg. This activity structure is then comparedwith traditional means of making products available to customers. It is concluded thatefficient organisation of activity structures for build-to-order production requires extensivecoordination in terms of information exchange and interaction across the boundaries of firms.The analysis also leads to the conclusion that efficient structures for build-to-order productionrequire flexibility in some dimensions, while in others they have to rely on rigidity.
Journal: ( – )
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Publish Year: 2004
Conference: Copenhagen, Denmark (2004)