Customer Integration Best Practices To Support Mass Customization In House-building Projects

Mass customisation is a business strategy that aims to make possible the production of a variety of products and yet keep price and delivery time within acceptable limits, thus increasing consumer satisfaction. This strategy has been widely used in the manufacture industry and there is a growing interest in its use in the construction industry. The implementation of mass customisation involves the introduction of changes in three different areas of the company: customer integration, product design, and operations management. Despite the growing interest on this topic in the construction industry, most companies that produce residential developments still find it challenging to adapt some core ideas from manufacturing for the adoption of this strategy. The focus of this paper in on customer integration and in the definition of mass customisation strategy. A set of best practices that have been used by residential construction companies from different parts of the world for customer integration and definition of mass customisation strategies is presented. Moreover, an indepth analysis of some practices has been made in an empirical study carried out in a Brazilian housebuilding company. The main contributions of this paper are related to the identification of practices, refinement and proposition of decision categories related to customer integration and the definition of business strategy.