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of economy [8,11] and also it enables a better understanding of the process itself and the involvement
of different departments and customers.
During the discussions with representatives of company P, it was highlighted how those practices
could be useful to support decision making, for example, by refining the solution space based on the
choice of residential project users. Furthermore, the participants expressed their understanding
towards the need to improve the identification of customers’ needs and the feedback from the
development process as two critical gaps in their current MC strategy. Finally, the assessment carried
out in this study was perceived by the customisation manager as a way to monitor the evolution of the
adoption of mass customisation in the company, providing a starting point for future assessments and
an opportunity to monitor further actions. This is an opportunity for further research in collaboration
with company P.
4. Discussion
This investigation has further explored how MC practices can be organised into decision categories.
That classification is helpful in terms of identifying possible gaps in the MC strategy, pointing out
improvement opportunities. Furthermore, new decision categories and some adaptations have been
proposed, bringing to light new concerns for defining MC strategies.
For example, one of the main issues identified during the empirical study was that many
customers would only be aware that they could customise their housing unit during the “first visit”
event. So, in order to better inform customers regarding the customisation offer company P could
embrace some practices such as using the product catalogue as a way to advertise but also to inform
customers as it happens in the Japanese industry [15,18], or they could provide a customer journey
illustration in their website instructing customers regarding product configuration. This also reflects
that the company does not fully advertise the potential of customisation, corroborating what was
observed in another study [4], which is a best practice related to the strategy and customisation level.
Regarding the assessment and feedback decision category, the relevance of monitoring the product
in use to capture requirements and feedback the development process of new residential projects has
also been highlighted in the literature [3,4]. Furthermore, other authors [3,6,9,11] argue that there is a
need for systematic ways of identifying customers’ demands and anticipating their preferences to
support the solution space definition, and one example of best practice found was proposed by
Schoenwitz et al. [11]. However, not much has been discussed regarding how this should be considered
in the MC strategy definition.
5. Conclusions
This paper proposes a refinement of MC core and customer integration decision categories found
in the literature. The main theoretical contributions of the paper were related to the proposition and
refinement of core and customer integration decision categories and their relationship with practices.
The assessment of the core and customer integration practices adopted by a house‐building
company from the South of Brazil allowed a systematic identification of improvement opportunities.
Within the construction context, as portrayed in the empirical study, there are still several research
opportunities to support the definition and implementation of MC strategies through best practices.
For instance, not much has been explored concerning configuration sequence practices, and
interdependencies between options to articulate choice menus and configuration processes. Finally,
there is still a need for further developments on the definition of core and customer integration decision
categories, and many opportunities to explore synergies between MC best practices and strategy
definition.
Funding: “This research was partially funded by CAPES”
Acknowledgments: The authors thank the collaboration of Company P it was key to the development of the
research. Also, they thank CAPES and Erasmus + for partially sponsoring this investigation.
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