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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (381830)	5/1/2008 9:50:42 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574493

Agree with some of what you say. My experience is that everything requires the right balance. You don't want complete mass customization, because it will eventually fold under the weight of costs. However, you don't want complete standardization, because it won't meet the majority of people's needs. So the trick is to come up with a basket of customer products that capture 80-90% of the variation that people desire. That is usually your sweetspot for expanding the market, feeding innovation, and allowing for continuous improvement. As i-node pointed out, BCBS has quite a few products that can be assembled from the variation within several modules within the overall coverage package. This is a great way to provide customization and yet still be standardized enough within a module to enable efficient processes to handle the overall variation. The key is balance across all metrics: good, cheap, and fast...quality, cost effectiveness, and low process cycle times.