IMCM'06: International Mass Customization Meeting

Call for Papers

Joint Conference of IMCM’06 and PETO’06
June 22-23, 2006, Hamburg/Germany

International Mass Customization Meeting (IMCM’06):
“Customer Interaction and Customer Integration”

International Conference on Economic, Technical and Organizational
Aspects of Product Configuration Systems (PETO’06):
“How to Build and Implement Product Configuration Systems”

Download pdf-version

We are pleased to announce and invite you to participate in the Joint Conference of IMCM’06 and PETO’06, which will be held at Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Germany from 22-23 June, 2006. This international conference is co-organized by the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Technical University of Denmark and University Klagenfurt.

Both prestigious conferences cooperate in 2006 for the first time in order to drive forward the research on mass customization and to close the gap between theory and practice. Mass Customization is a business strategy that aims at producing goods and services for individual customers’ needs, while achieving economics of scale in operations and manufacturing related tasks. Practitioners and researchers working in this field are invited to submit their papers, in which they present original works and new advances in mass customization. This can refer to theoretical concepts, information and managerial tools as well as best practices.

Theme and Objectives

IMCM’06

The general objective of IMCM’06 is to discuss the new advances achieved in the fields of customer interaction and integration, which are of particular importance in order to ensure a successful implementation of mass customization. In fact, the scope of customer interaction and integration goes beyond the fulfillment of individual customer requirements within a given mass customization framework. Indeed, customer input should be exploited in order to support critical decisions concerning the design and adaptation of future frameworks. Thus the goal-oriented use of customer knowledge makes it possible for companies to continuously align their capabilities with changing customer requirements. The achievement of these goals calls for a joint effort of various fields including Marketing, Psychology, Engineering, Logistics (especially if customers should be involved in the manufacturing processes), and Information Technology. Consequently, IMCM’06 is seeking for best practices and original research papers in these areas, which address the problem of tight customer interaction and integration in mass customization.

PETO’06

Research related to product configuration systems has gained an increasing importance with the emergence of the mass customization paradigm. The benefits of such software systems for the automation of order fulfillment are well-known. However, building and implementing them still remain a challenging task. In fact, not only technological but also economical and organizational aspects are of high relevance in order for companies to put successfully these systems into practice. Toward this aim, many important factors should be taken into account. For instance, product assortments should be evaluated according to their readiness for configuration. The result of such assessment may be the redesign of product architectures so as to enable the creation of variety through modularity. Business processes should also be analyzed and reengineered, especially those that will be supported by the configuration system. The modeling techniques, which come into play after product and process redesign aim to adequately represent the components and to ascertain the optimal logic enabling the inference of consistent product variants. Furthermore, it is important that the organization is adapted in a suitable manner so as to reap the benefits of these software systems. It is within the scope of these fields that PETO’06 looks for original papers from academia and industry in order to drive forward the research on product configuration systems from different perspectives.

Topics

Due to the complex and interdisciplinary disposition of these conferences, we expect contributions from Business Administration & Economics, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Natural Sciences, as well as cross-disciplinary contributions from practitioners. Ongoing or completed research as well as papers with a main focus on practice and case studies are welcome

We welcome abstracts/papers addressing topics relevant for customer interaction/customer integration and product configuration systems within the broad area of Mass Customization, e.g.

Adaptive supply chains

Custom order control in MC manufacturing

Customer and supplier integration

Customer needs’ elicitation

Customer-Relationship-Management

Customization of logistic processes

Design and implementation of product configuration systems

Design of a product architecture based on platforms and modules

Design sales and engineering processes

Implementation of configurators in practice

Modeling a product assortment

Open Innovation

Organization effects of configurators

Personalization and advisory systems

Placement of the decoupling point

Product family management and modular architectures

Production and Logistic systems complexity

Production planning and control

Role of logistics service providers in customer integration

Selection of standard configuration software for specific configuration tasks

Short and long term economic impacts of product information systems

Variety management and costs of variety

Submission of Abstracts

Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research results/best practices for consideration in IMCM’06 and PETO’06

Abstracts for papers should describe the nature and relevance of the problems, the research methodology, and work-in-progress or final research results. Abstracts must not exceed 800 words and should be in MS.Word and PDF format. The font type for body text should be ‘Arial’ size 11 while the title size 12 with ‘BOLD UPPER CASE’. Abstracts for Papers should include three to four keywords and all authors’ contact information. The official conference language is English.

Please submit the abstracts to the following Email addresses:

IMCM06@manufacturing.de

Important Information

Conference Website

December 10, 2005

December 19, 2005

March 1, 2006

March 31, 2006

http://www.manufacturing.de/calls/imcm06+peto06

Abstract due (800 words)

Notification of authors

Final paper submission