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A critical issue facing manufacturing companies is to achieve product variety while maintaining mass production efficiency. Although many methodologies, approaches and tools have been reported, they deal with design of customized products, instead of production. Therefore, this book purports two new concepts, process platform and production configuration, to facilitate production of customized products while utilizing existing manufacturing resources. These concepts are proposed to support production process planning of customized products. Systematic methodologies are discussed in detail to accommodate the definition, construction and development of process platforms and production configuration systems. To better demonstrate these concepts, a number of case studies using vibration motors has been conducted in an electronics company. These case applications shed light on the fundamentals of and issues associated with process platforms and production configuration. The positive application results further prove that process platforms and production configuration are useful to process engineers, industrial engineers, or anyone else who are involved in production process planning.

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Linda Zhang, Ph.D. (2007) in Industrial Engineering. Studied at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Tianjin University, China. Assistant Professor in Department of Operations at University of Groningen, Netherlands. Research interests lie in mass customization, production configuration and product family development.

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