Teaching customer-centric operations management – evidence from an experiential learning-oriented mass customisation class

ABSTRACT

The increase of individualised customer demands and tough competition in the manufacturing sector gave rise to more customer-centric operations management such as products and services (mass) customisation. Mass customisation (MC), which inherits the ‘economy of scale’ from mass production (MP), aims to meet specific customer demands with near MP efficiency. Such an overarching concept has multiple impacts on operations management. This requires highly qualified and multi-skilled engineers who are well prepared for managing MC. Therefore, this concept should be properly addressed by engineering education curricula which needs to keep up with the emerging business trends. This paper introduces a novel course about MC and variety in operations management which recalls several Experiential Learning (EL) practices consistently with the principle of an active learning. The paper aims to analyse to which extent EL can improve the efficiency of the teaching methods and the retention rate in the context of operations management. The proposed course is given to engineering students whose’ perceptions are collected using semi-structured questionnaires and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The paper highlights the relevance (i) of teaching MC, and (ii) of active learning in engineering education, through the specific application in the domain of MC.

KEYWORDS:

• Mass customisation
• engineering education
• experiential learning
• case study
• operations management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Khaled Medini is currently an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering at Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, Fayol Institute, since 2013. He received his Ph.D. from Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 2013. He holds a M.Sc. of Industrial Engineering from Ecole Centrale de Lille, 2010 and an Engineer Diploma from Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Tunis, 2009, in Industrial Engineering. His research interests relate to decision-making support by use of performance evaluation, enterprise modelling and simulation, in the contexts of MC, product–service systems (PSS) and sustainable development. Khaled Medini has been involved in European (FP7 and Erasmus+), national and regional research projects about PSS and MC.