Applications for Frugal Product Customization and Design of Manufacturing Networks

Manufacturing is moving towards a new era of frugal innovation, exploiting customization and regionalization practices, where companies base their business on mobility and on adapting local market requirements, resulting to a new business model through low-cost and high customer value solutions. Mobile applications and advanced decision-making tools are becoming more and more necessary in order to address individual needs and preferences of customers and markets, in general. Towards that end, this paper presents a framework that consists of a mobile application supported by augmented reality technology, and a manufacturing network design tool supported by a smart search algorithm. The proposed framework aims to support the customer integration in the product design phase and, consequently, in the design of the manufacturing network. The proposed work is validated in a white-goods industry.