Simulation-based Performance Improvement Towards Mass Customization in Make to Order Repetitive Company

AbstractThe diversity of customers needs and wants leads the manufacture to be agile. The products must be high customized products and very close to the customers’ expectations. In order-based manufacturing environment such as Make to Order (MTO) company, production activity could be started only after the orders were received. However, naturally, customers don’t want to wait for long time, hence, short lead time is a must besides high customization. Such situation forces the company to combine the concept of order-based and stock-based manufacturing. This study presents the design of manufacturing that has high flexibility to produce many type of products with short manufacturing lead time using Mass Customization (MC) concept. Improvement of the manufacturing system is carried out through the definition of Customer Order Decoupling Point (CODP). The manufacturing design and analysis is conducted using simulation approach while the case study is taken from real manufacturing system which is a furniture company in Indonesia. Result of this study shows that the proposed manufacturing design could reduce the manufacturing lead time from 43 days to 24 days or about 44.19% when producing 15 types of product with varying demand