Highlights in Customer-driven Operations Management Research

The evolution from mass-produced to mass-customized and even personalized products, services, and product-service bundles leads to increasing complexity of operations management. These new realities challenge companies in both business-to-business and business-to-customer markets to compete not only on the traditional basis of cost, quality, and delivery time but also on the capabilities in managing this increasing operational complexity. The objective of this paper is to identify key challenges and opportunities in managing operations in complex customer-driven manufacturing covering the value network, requirements engineering, product configuration, and the production systems, as well as the opportunities for handling these through digitally-enabled methods and tools for materializing the Industry 4.0 vision of efficient lot-size-one productions.