This 2008 book will show how to: Build any product, standard or mass-customized, on-demand without forecasts or inventory. Simplify supply chains to resupply spontaneously, rather than trying to manage complex supply chains that order and wait for parts. Achieve substantial cost advantages from eliminating inventory and many overhead costs. Revolutionize company business models with evolutionary self-supporting steps for dramatic growth of revenue and profits.

This book will be extremely valuable for manufacturers that have any of these challenges:

Customization. Craft customizing is slow, expensive, and hard to maintain quality. Customizing by mass production is inefficient and compromises the other production.

Product Variety. Build-to-forecast producers sell products from inventory. As variety increases, it gets harder to keep enough of every variation in stock to satisfy demand.

Unreliable Forecasts. Forecast accuracy decreases dramatically as variety and market volatility increase, which are both rising.

Inventory Problems. Selling products from inventory creates many problems: out-of-stocks, obsolescence, write-offs, inventory carrying costs, and discounting unsold inventory.

Response time. Manufacturers of products or industrial parts may try to build products to-order but will not be able to deliver them quickly if they have to wait for parts, setup changes, and equipment availability.

Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization (A Harvard Business Review Book) by Gilmore, James
Lean Six Sigma : Combining Six Sigma Quality with Lean Production Speed by George, Michael L.

Build-to-Order & Mass Customization
Mass customization is a goal of almost every manufacturing organization. It is especially difficult to find in one book the essential tools, methods and concepts which will enable an organization to migrate towards a build-to-order or mass customization system. This book provide practical advice regarding product rationalization, design standardization and other tools, methods and concepts which any organization will find immediately useful in expanding its operational flexibility.

Five chapters on supply chain management show how to simplify supply chains to the point where parts and materials can be pulled into production on-demand to support on-demand production. Intricate perspective plant drawings show the flow of parts and information for the mass customization of fabricated or electronic products. The two chapters on total cost and how to quantify it are something all companies need, especially mass customizers. The book concludes with a chapter on implementation and another that presents the business case for mass customization.

The 520 page book is comprehensive, but busy executives can get up to speed quickly by reading the executive summary which summarizes the whole book. It is easy to read with hundreds of side-bars which highlight key points. It makes a fantastic reference book with hundreds of headings and a huge index.

Unfortunately this book falls short of capturing the complexity of this transition, which is not helped by the general lack of emprical evidence. I would have expected a comprehensive discussion of the organisational changes needed to make the transition, but instead the book seems to feature the author's personal opinion based on a few limited cases only. Overall a rather disappointing title.