Mass customization (MC) is a well-established strategy for providing high levels of customization while achieving the scale economies of high volume production. The purpose of this paper is to explore a new service design configuration, the “mid office,” as a service interface which may support front office customization capabilities while protecting the back office from disruption. The authors posit that it may facilitate MC by enabling product/service and organizational modularity.

The research is based on a single case study of a large European bank’s payment services, traditionally high volume, low variety operations. The bank adopted a MC strategy which involved the creation of a mid office. The analysis spans product/service and organizational design.

– When combined with menu-driven customization and reuse modularization, the mid office appears to support partial rather than full MC. It facilitates postponement of customization to the assembly stage through service coproduction, organizational decoupling, and the streamlining of employee adaptive behaviors.

International Journal of Operations & Production Management , Vol. 35 Iss: 6, pp.866 - 894 

For more information, contact rhian.silvestro@wbs.ac.uk