In this article, I will talk about developing custom or personalized customer orders in Agile mode to respond faster to market demands.
To better understand the issue you can read some background:
The Italian structural condition of product development
The Creative Economy and Industry 5.0
That said, the question I am always asked is whether agile product development logics can also be applied to the development of “custom” customer orders.
Within a client order there is less flexibility on requirements that are part of the contract negotiation.
I am dealing with this in a company that develops high-tech products within customer orders.
Contract requirements are largely characterized by performance characteristics: the weight, operating temperature, working range and so on.
These characteristics reverberate across a multiplicity of elements that make up the product backlog, that is, the set of things to be done.
What has emerged is that there is ample room for maneuver in design with respect to the value content provided to the customer.
If the customized product for the customer is breakable, which is very common, into a standard part, and a part that represents customization, two paralleland mutually integrated development processes can be created.
After an initial concept phase, which is essential to identify these two areas, the standard part can be developed with conventional Waterfall and/or Lean methods through the previously applied construction and supply channels.
Crossing lead times will be basically that of the standard machine plus time for concept development.
The custom part can be developed in an Agile way, integrating development phases, with accelerated build methods and dedicated procurement channels
In my experience, the design workload goes from a few hours, to put BOMs and specifications for the standard part, to hundreds of hours of development for the custom part.
Depending on the cost of delay, and thus the available budget, intermediate evaluations of design solutions are also possible with the construction of pretotypes and related test equipment.
It is in this case a virtuous combination of a traditional Waterfall and Lean approach, for the standard part, and an Agile approach for the custom part.
The meeting point is in the final stage of mating or assembling the custom and standard parts.
A modular product architecture is greatly functional in facilitating the separate development of these two areas.
The final phase can continue by integrating the two approaches, with a prevalence of iterative and incremental Agile approaches.
Thinking about the Italian landscape made up largely of manufacturing companies that develop customized products this can be a winning solution to enable mass customization.
