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Mass Customization
Mass customization makes use of flexible computer-aided systems to produce custom products. Such systems combine the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization. Mass customization is the new frontier in business for both manufacturing and service industries. At its core, is a tremendous increase in variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs. At its limit, it is the mass production of individually customized goods and services. At its best, it provides strategic advantage and economic value. Product design strategy Mass customization is a product design strategy and is currently used with both delayed differentiation and modular design to enhance the value delivered to customers. Mass customization is the method of, "effectively postponing the task of differentiating a product for a specific customer until the latest possible point in the supply network". From a collaborative engineering perspective ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Production (economics)
Production is the process of combining various inputs, both material (such as metal, wood, glass, or plastics) and immaterial (such as plans, or knowledge) in order to create output. Ideally this output (economics), output will be a goods and services, good or service which has value (economics), value and contributes to the utility (economics), utility of individuals. The area of economics that focuses on production is called production theory, and it is closely related to the consumption (or consumer) theory of economics. The production process and output directly result from productively utilising the original inputs (or factors of production). Known as primary producer goods or services, land, labour, and capital are deemed the three fundamental factors of production. These primary inputs are not significantly altered in the output process, nor do they become a whole component in the product. Under classical economics, materials and energy are categorised as secondary factors a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
End-user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrators, database administrators, information technology (IT) experts, software professionals, and computer technicians. End users typically do not possess the technical understanding or skill of the product designers, a fact easily overlooked and forgotten by designers: leading to features creating low customer satisfaction. In information technology, end users are not customers in the usual sense—they are typically employees of the customer. For example, if a large retail corporation buys a software package for its employees to use, even though the large retail corporation was the ''customer'' that purchased the software, the end users are the employees of the company, who will use the software at work. Context End users are one of the thre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personalization
Personalization (broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or product to accommodate specific individuals. It is sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. Personalization involves collecting data on individuals, including web browsing history, web cookies, and location. Various organizations use personalization (along with the opposite mechanism of popularization) to improve customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for advertising. Personalization acts as a key element in social media and recommender systems. Personalization influences every sector of society — be it work, leisure, or citizenship. History The idea of personalization is rooted in ancient rhetoric as part of the practice of an agent or communicator being responsive to the needs of the audience. When industrialization influenced the rise of mass communication, the practice of message personaliza ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of the secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products (such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles), or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers (usually through wholesalers, who in turn sell to retailers, who then sell them to individual customers). Manufacturing engineering is the field of engineering that designs and optimizes the manufacturing process, or the steps through which raw materials are transformed i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mail Merge
Mail merge consists of combining mail and letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a form letter. This feature is usually employed in a word processing document which contains fixed text (which is the same in each output document) and variables (which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source word to word). Some word processors can insert content from a database, spreadsheet, or table into text documents. It is a powerful tool for writing a personalized letter or e-mail to many people at the same time. It imports data from another source such as a spreadsheet and then uses that to replace placeholders throughout the message with the relevant information for each individual that is being messaged. History Mail merge dates back to early word processors on personal computers, circa 1980.see p. 2-2; MailMerge not a new feature, and this is 2nd Ed, (C) 1982 WordStar was perhaps the earliest to provide this, originally v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Long Tail
In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc. The term is often used loosely, with no definition or an arbitrary definition, but precise definitions are possible. In statistics, the term ''long-tailed distribution'' has a narrow technical meaning, and is a subtype of heavy-tailed distribution. Intuitively, a distribution is (right) long-tailed if, for any fixed amount, when a quantity exceeds a high level, it almost certainly exceeds it by at least that amount: large quantities are probably even larger. Note that there is no sense of ''the'' "long tail" of a distribution, but only the ''property'' of a distribution being long-tailed. In business, the term ''long tail'' is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Knowledge-based Configuration
Knowledge-based configuration, also referred to as product configuration or product customization, is an activity of Personalization, customising a product to meet the needs of a particular customer. The product in question may consist of mechanical parts, services, and software. Knowledge-based configuration is a major application area for artificial intelligence (AI), and it is based on modelling of the configurations in a manner that allows the utilisation of AI techniques for searching for a valid configuration to meet the needs of a particular customer. Background Knowledge-based configuration (of complex products and services) has a long history as an artificial intelligence application area, see, e.g. Informally, configuration can be defined as a "special case of design activity, where the artifact being configured is assembled from instances of a fixed set of well-defined component types which can be composed conforming to a set of constraints". Such constraints represent tec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Industry 4
"Fourth Industrial Revolution", "4IR", or "Industry 4.0", is a neologism describing rapid technological advancement in the 21st century. It follows the Third Industrial Revolution (the "Information Age"). The term was popularised in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum founder and former executive chairman, who asserts that these developments represent a significant shift in industrial capitalism. A part of this phase of industrial change is the joining of technologies like artificial intelligence, gene editing, to advanced robotics that blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. Throughout this, fundamental shifts are taking place in how the global production and supply network operates through ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology, large-scale machine-to-machine communication (M2M), and the Internet of things (IoT). This integration results in increasing automation, impro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dell
Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcams among other products and services. Dell is based in Round Rock, Texas. Founded by Michael Dell in 1984, Dell started making IBM IBM PC compatible, clone computers and pioneered selling cut-price PCs directly to customers, managing its supply chain management, supply chain and electronic commerce. The company rose rapidly during the 1990s and in 2001 it became the largest global PC vendor for the first time. Dell was a pure hardware vendor until 2009 when it acquired Perot Systems. Dell then entered the market for IT services. The company has expanded storage and networking systems. In the late 2000s, it began expanding from offering computers only to delivering a range of technology for enterprise customers. Dell is a subsidiary of Dell ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Configurator
Configurators, also known as choice boards, design systems, toolkits, or co-design platforms, are responsible for guiding the user through the configuration process. Different variations are represented, visualized, assessed and priced which starts a learning-by-doing process for the user. While the term “configurator” or “configuration system” is quoted rather often in literature, it is used for the most part in a technical sense, addressing a software tool. The success of such an interaction system is, however, not only defined by its technological capabilities, but also by its integration in the whole sale environment, its ability to allow for learning by doing, to provide experience and process satisfaction, and its integration into the brand concept. () Advantages Configurators can be found in various forms and different industries (). They are employed in B2B (business to business), as well as B2C (business to consumer) markets and are operated either by trained sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continuous Improvement
A continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process (abbreviated as CIP or CI), is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek " incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once. Delivery (customer valued) processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. Some see continual improvement processes as a meta-process for most management systems (such as business process management, quality management, project management, and program management). W. Edwards Deming, a pioneer of the field, saw it as part of the 'system' whereby feedback from the process and customer were evaluated against organisational goals. The fact that it can be called a management process does not mean that it needs to be executed by 'management'; but rather merely that it makes decisions about the implementation of the delivery process and the design ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Invention
An invention is a unique or novelty (patent), novel machine, device, Method_(patent), method, composition, idea, or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an idea is unique enough either as a stand-alone invention or as a significant improvement over the work of others, it can be patented. A patent, if granted, gives the inventor a proprietary interest in the patent over a specific period of time, which can be licensed for financial gain. An inventor creates or discovers an invention. The word ''inventor'' comes from the Latin verb ''invenire'', ''invent-'', to find. Although inventing is closely associated with science and engineering, inventors are not necessarily engineers or scientists. The ideation process may be augmented by the applications of algorithms and methods from the domain collectively known as evolutionary robotics, artificial intellige ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
