An AHP-based method for improvement of the manufacturing process of mass customization

Mass customization (MC), as a competitive strategy, has been becoming increasingly important especially in manufacturing industry. In order to keep the company being a winner in the nowadays drastically competitive market, manufacturing processes of MC should be kept sustaining improvement. To this end, the processes that are currently most problematic and have biggest negative impact on the MC manufacturing, which are named as bottleneck processes of MC that are different from those of traditional mass production, should be first identified before improving them. In this paper, a method based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is presented to identify the bottleneck process. The evaluation criteria are set up according to MC´s characteristic, and some strategies for improvement are proposed. A case study about elevator manufacturing is provided.