A virtual electronic call center solution for mass customization

Since mass customization is becoming more and more important as a marketing strategy, companies have to produce highly specialized and individualized products. To satisfy these customer demands, manufacturers, suppliers and retailers are building networks and connecting their application systems together. For this, electronic commerce techniques are a considerable asset for speeding up the inter-company coordination process. In this paper, an approach is discussed that supports distributed but logically integrated business processes in which complex and hard-to-standardize data occur, by applying e-commerce techniques. By doing so, the inter-company data exchange, planning and coordination of the production processes in the case of mass customization are improved.