Milan Kratochvil

The Time for Mass Customization Has Arrived Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison There’s an allegory that many inventors have used to define their moment of inspiration when diligence, a strong work ethic and imagination met at the intersection of unmet needs – and a paradigm shift in technology happened. Thomas Edison once said that opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. That’s the case with mass customization, make-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order product strategies globally, across manufacturers and service organizations today. In the work of mass customization are significant rewards to customer responsiveness, service, and financial performance of any organization. Aiming at the goal of driving lean manufacturing, companies are finding that the strategies that looked like the hardest work, dressed in overalls as Edison would say, are delivering the biggest impact on the financial statements of the companies that boldly take on serving customers in entirely new ways. Driving costs of organizations through more accuracy in orders, assuring that highly configured products are actually what a customer has ordered, and making the many product attributes in complex products accessible for the creation of entirely new production workflows and products, is real and is delivering costs savings while driving up margins.

The Time for Mass Customization Has Arrived Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison There’s an allegory that many inventors have used to define their moment of inspiration when diligence, a strong work ethic and imagination met at the intersection of unmet needs – and a paradigm shift in technology happened. Thomas Edison once said that opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. That’s the case with mass customization, make-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order product strategies globally, across manufacturers and service organizations today. In the work of mass customization are significant rewards to customer responsiveness, service, and financial performance of any organization. Aiming at the goal of driving lean manufacturing, companies are finding that the strategies that looked like the hardest work, dressed in overalls as Edison would say, are delivering the biggest impact on the financial statements of the companies that boldly take on serving customers in entirely new ways. Driving costs of organizations through more accuracy in orders, assuring that highly configured products are actually what a customer has ordered, and making the many product attributes in complex products accessible for the creation of entirely new production workflows and products, is real and is delivering costs savings while driving up margins.

If you are a non-technical person with a stake in the success of a software project, this book is for you. Business managers often find it impossible to communicate business objectives and specify their software requirements to technical members of staff. This beginner’s guide teaches readers to communicate with software developers in a more focused, effective way. It describes the basic diagrams of the UML modeling notation and shows how they are used to specify requirements in an unambiguous way. When used on project, the risk of failure through unclear requirements is removed.

One of the most interesting fields of mathematically oriented chemical research is the so-called computer-assisted organic synthesis design. These lecture notes elaborate the mathematical model of organic chemistry, which offers formal concepts for unambiguous description of computer algorithms for organic synthesis design including retrosynthesis and reaction mechanisms. All definitions and theorems are supplemented by many illustrative examples. The model is closely related to the course of thinking of organic chemists. These notes will be useful for all theoretically oriented organic chemists who are interested in mathematical modelling of organic chemistry and computer-assisted organic synthesis design.