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加拿大魁北克拉瓦尔大学留学生论文定制Mass customisation of wood furniture as a competitive strategy
Urs Buehlmann
Buehlmann Consulting
San Diego, CA 92154, USA
Fax: (310) 924 4902
E-mail: buehlmann@gmail.com
Robert Beauregard
Université Laval
Québec, G1K 7P4, Canada
Fax: (418) 656 5262
E-mail: robert.beauregard@sbf.ulaval.ca
Abstract: The existence of some segments of the US furniture industry isthreatened by imports from offshore countries. Mass Customisation (MC) isdiscussed as a competitive strategy for US furniture manufacturers tooffset their intrinsic production cost disadvantage. Examples from fourdomestic furniture industry subsectors are used to propose a possiblecorrelation between the level of product customisation (MC) offered and theirsuccess in the market. The US kitchen cabinet industry was found to offer thehighest level of MC of all subsectors analysed. Interestingly, at the presenttime, the kitchen cabinet industry is not heavily affected by offshoreimports. The wood household furniture industry, on the other hand, wasranked last in regard to MC and was also the one most heavily affected byoffshore imported furniture. The study indicates that MC can be used as asuccessful business strategy for domestic producers competing with low-costoffshore manufacturers.

Keywords: Mass Customisation; MC; furniture; business models; furniture manufacturer survey; market globalisation; industrial engineering; lean
manufacturing; United States; US.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Lihra, T., Buehlmann, U.and Beauregard, R. (2008) ‘Mass customisation of wood furniture as a
competitive strategy’, Int. J. Mass Customisation, Vol. 2, Nos. 3/4,
pp.200–215.Mass customisation of wood furniture as a competitive strategy 201Biographical notes: Torsten Lihra is Leader of the Furniture Group at ForintekCanada Corp., Canada’s wood products research institute. He played a key role
in creating the Partenariat de recherche sur l’industrie du meuble (PARIM)(Research Partnership for the Furniture Industry), a major initiative forconducting R&D dedicated to the Canadian furniture industry. His researchwork is focused on marketing and management issues related to the furnitureindustry. Holding a Master’s Degree in Wood Science, Mr. Lihra is presentlyworking on a PhD project on mass customisation concepts for North Americanfurniture manufacturers.Urs Buehlmann is President of Buehlmann Consulting, an engineering andmanagement consulting enterprise serving the forest products and relatedindustries. He also serves as an Adjunct Faculty at Université Laval, Québec.
He was a Faculty at North Carolina State University, where his area ofexpertise focused on business strategies to successfully compete in a globaleconomy. He holds a PhD, an MBA and an Engineering Degree.Robert Beauregard is Senior Chair Holder of the Industrial Research Chair on
Engineered Wood Products for Structural and Appearance Applications(CIBISA). His area of expertise is the modelling of manufacturing systems forthe forest industries. He develops comprehensive approaches to the design ofbusiness models, taking into account the interactions between the woodresource, process development and innovative products for better businessperformance. In 1995–1997, he was Research Scientist with the New ZealandForest Research Institute. From 1997 to 2000, he was at the Eastern Laboratoryof Forintek Canada Corp., where he was instrumental in the creat本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。