Joanna DAABOUL Enseignant-chercheur

Industries nowadays are facing difficult socio-economic environment and are struggling to survive. Increased legislations, more demanding customers, shorter product life cycle, demand for increased product variety, severe competition, exponential technological development, internet evolution, highly changing customer behavior, etc. are some of the characteristics of this environment. Both the product design process as well as the manufacturing system has evolved through the years to allow enterprises to survive in such a changing environment. From the product design, more and more companies are offering mass customized products. From the process view, manufacturing systems are migrating towards more flexible systems such as cellular and reconfigurable manufacturin systems.

My research work is dedicated to mass customization and production management in flexible manufacturing systems.

Mass customization (MC) has become a reality and an important strategy for survival in today's economy. It is defined as producing customized products at a cost similar to that of mass production (MP). However there are several ways to offer customized products, such as adding customized services, chosing among different colors, combining different modules, and co-designing the product. Since 1993, several works have helped companies in several specific areas, such as tools for designing mass customized products, tools supporting the interaction with the customer, etc… Nevertheless, one question remains unanswered: how to decide to move from MP to MC? How to evaluate this opportunity to improve the performance of the enterprise? How to decide what type of MC to put in place? What are the most important factors to drive? And how to evaluate the transition from an MC system to that of MP? To address these issues we propose a decision support method and tool to move from MP to MC. Our approach consists of evaluating the enterprise’s performance by modelling and simulating a value network. Our scientific proposal is validated via a case study from the footwear industry. We use the SimulValor language to which we have made some improvements, and a discrete event simulation system in which we created our own library of value network. The main indicator of performance is the value generated for which we propose a model that is combined with the conceptual model of the value network. The combined models are simulated and evaluated to help determine the transition from MP to MC considering not only profit, but also delays, costs and customer satisfaction.

Another issue in mass customization, is how to best configure the product based on customer customization. Our work proposes mathematical programming approach to optimize product configuration while improving overall manufacturing costs.