Overcoming the customization-responsiveness squeeze by using product configurators: Beyond anecdotal evidence

Anecdotal evidence suggests that product configurators may be crucial in improving time performance when offering customized products so as to overcome what has been termed the customization-responsiveness squeeze. Large-scale hypothesis-testing studies that either corroborate this finding or discover unpredicted boundaries of validity are still lacking, however. Our paper contributes to fill this gap by testing the positive impact of product configurator use on time performance on a sample of 238 manufacturing plants from three industries and eight countries. The results support the hypothesized impact after the effects of widely acknowledged antecedents of accelerated time performance have been removed. Implications of our findings for both research and practice are finally discussed.