In recent years, competition in the metal processing industry has focused on the competition of high value-added products. These products in particular have a wealth of custom properties, such as alloy types, applications, heat treatment methods, shape, size specifications, packaging methods, implementation of quality standards, cutting methods. For the complex combination of these properties of the plate, belt, foil, pipe, profile products, how to not only sacrifice the economic benefits of mass production, but also can quickly respond to the market, to meet the customer's customized requirements, "mass customization" is the metal processing companies improve Strategic choice for competitiveness.
"Mass Customization" can not only understand and meet the needs of individual customers, but also can produce customized products for individual customers or small batch and multi-variety markets with large-scale production methods and speed.
The road to mass customization is mainly to improve the agile adaptability of manufacturing, the so-called "flexible manufacturing." For discrete manufacturing enterprises such as automotive electronics, which are characterized by assembly, it is usually to optimize the similarity among the enterprise parts, parts and products, and to move the “individualized†control points required by customer orders to the downstream of the production process as much as possible. Reducing various costs in the design, manufacturing, and assembly processes to meet the special needs of customers' orders, and in the assembly process, through flexible automated production lines and advanced shop scheduling technologies. For metal processing companies, the production process is characterized by strong continuity, high degree of automation, and sophisticated process control and quality control. Therefore, to realize the "flexibility" of the production process, there must be a set of mechanisms that quantify the customer's individual requirements for the product, such as quantity, specifications, process requirements, quality specifications, and delivery time, as defined in the product manufacturing process, and define the process. Establishing industrial control linkages with the metallurgical and processing processes, ie, automated cross-integration of so-called “integration of production and sales†and “management integrationâ€. For example, an iron and steel company produces traditional steel rebars and hot-rolled steel strips for construction projects in thousands of varieties. However, after hot-rolled and cold-rolled steel sheets and coils are put into production, the product specifications are close to one million in only one year. The company uses a mass customization management philosophy. The properties such as steel grades, specifications, and quality standards of customer orders are automatically converted into manufacturing execution instructions and communicated to the industrial control system. In the supply chain process, tracking according to customer orders is achieved, and on a large scale. The agile response to customers was achieved in the production model.
The implementation of "mass customization" is bound to face a series of changes in the management model, metal processing companies in the following areas of management change is particularly important:
Marketing business model: From the perspective of marketing model, mass customization emphasizes closer to customers. For the metal processing industry, the first is the change in the nature of the sales channels. Traditional metal processing products have a single product size and simple technical requirements. Companies are generally "sit on business," relying mainly on dealers' market coverage. In the mass customization model, companies need to be closer to customers in order to reflect the individual needs of customers. Therefore, companies need to establish a more direct and customer interaction model. The second change is the integration of production, sales, and research. Under the mass customization model, the technical content of sales work has been greatly enhanced. Some companies have set up positions for technical representatives and laterally guide sales, production, and scientific research. The third point is to provide deep processing and personal services.
Enterprise organization model: The flexible production requires that the enterprise organization is more market-oriented, flexible, and flat, and the performance evaluation system surrounding the enterprise organization should be more emphasis on efficiency and emphasize the increase of customer prices. The first is the flexible organizational structure and order-oriented business process design. The "mass ordering" business process of "make-to-order" requires metal processing business to focus on orders. In the past, the production planning and material control of each branch and workshop were carried out. They are all in their own right, and now the entire company's operations are accurately controlled according to customer orders. The second is to establish a customer-centric performance management model. The traditional indicator of corporate performance evaluation is to allocate economic indicators such as the company’s output, sales, and profits to each branch for assessment. With the adjustment of product structure and the expansion of scale, such a performance management system is increasingly unable to In the “scale-customized†environment, the incentive mechanism for the sub-factories is established, and the sub-plants are independent of each other. Starting from the completion of the output indicators, they are reluctant to produce products with complex processing conditions and small batch sizes, resulting in low customer compliance rates on time. Therefore, with sales as the leading factor, the company has comprehensively added performance indicators such as customer's order fulfillment rate, order fulfillment cycle, billing rate, unit product gross margin and other performance indicators, so that local and overall coordination.
Enterprise business process-driven model: Traditional large-scale production methods drive the business process is a "manufacturing-sales" model, it is product-oriented, customers are mainly in a passive position in the buying and selling relationship, and mass customization is customer-oriented. The driver of business processes is the "perception-response" model. Metal processing companies need to consider driving business process changes from the perspective of customers, such as improving the status of product research and development, fostering the ability of enterprise product R&D to adapt to the market, taking customer needs as the source of R&D, and improving the precision and frequency of delivery; Adapt the flexible production supply chain coordination mechanism.
The central role of informatization in the realization of mass customization is to realize large-scale customization. The role of informatization can be described as crucial. In particular, the establishment of a four-tier system with ERP as its core and three-tier system with manufacturing as its core are interoperable , Pass the customer's individualized requirements directly to manufacturing process control and industrial automation systems.
In a comprehensive view, to achieve "mass customization", at the level of management informatization, we must have such characteristics: to adapt to the production of metal processing products of various scales, to concentrate the production of metal processing products of various specifications, and to include centralized management. Metallurgical specifications of chemical and physical properties to automatically match customer order requirements, automatically configure sales orders and purchase orders through customer demand characteristics, throughout the company's internal supply chain, including sales, planning, manufacturing, and procurement processes, through the attribute system to control logistics , Throughout the entire company's supply chain quality management, according to the actual processing time of the order and materials for cost accounting