Information technologies and mass customization applications

As a result of economical and technological development, production systems have subjected to change in time and have shown improvement to provide the needs of companies and consumers that are continuously changing. The development starting with the industrial revolution of the production systems converts the craft production systems into mass production systems. Moving one step further, quality revolution converts the mass production systems into the lean production systems. Today, market being seperated into individual parts heterogeneously, a new system that aims supplying the consumer needs and combines the production systems with information technologies is needed. This new system that produces the products of craft production system special for individuals with mass production costs and principles at lean production is called mass customization system. Mass customization system is the individualization of high numbers of product or service with low costs under individual consumer demands. In the system that runs together with information technologies, the products or services designed by the consumer, is produced by computer controlled production systems. The aim of this thesis is to introduce the mass customization system and its relation with information technologies. Also the system is compared with the others, its general properties, how the production line works and its application to information technologies are explained in detail. For determine the consumer preferences, a questionaire study applicated on a firm that used the mass customization system via internet and the results analized with statistical techniques.