Mass Customization: the New Frontier in Business Competition

New ways of managing, together with new technology, make possible the seeming paradox of providing each customer with the "tailor-made" benefits of the pre-industrial craft system at the low costs of modern mass production. Companies that are leading their industries to this new frontier include McGraw-Hill, which can deliver custom-made classroom textbooks in quantities of one hundred or less; Motorola, which can manufacture any one of 29 million variations of pages twenty minutes after it receives the order; & TWA Getaway Vacations, which can custom-design tour packages for what others charge for standard tours. Companies that have discovered mass customization are outpacing their competitors in gaining customers & higher margins.