Welcome to the e-CUSTOM portal

Mass production does no longer seem suitable for today’s market and is being replaced by mass customization.  The need for satisfying an individual customer’s requirements is now stronger than ever before.  Customers require that the product they buy fulfil their personal requirements in an individualized manner.

The e-CUSTOM project aims to overcome the challenges that the European manufacturers are faced with, by developing innovative approaches, which can now make it possible to prepare unique product designs, manufacture these products and communicate them on a mass basis.  The innovative approach of the e-CUSTOM will support the higher alignment of production with the actual customer demand, while shortening the design time for personalized products by up to 15%.  

 The e-CUSTOM consortium contains an excellent combination of partners coming from industry, research institutes and universities, with excellent expertise in the execution of RTD projects and strong commitment to cooperation, in order to deliver to the European manufacturing companies the best possible project results. 

In order to materialize the ambitious concept of e-CUSTOM, the partners will accomplish a set of scientific and technical objectives, classified in accordance to the four Pylons of the project:

Pylon I: User Adaptive Design System (UADS).  The objectives under this Pylon focus on the development of user friendly design tools that will allow the customers to perform unique design changes in their order, in a controlled way. 

Pylon II: Decentralized Manufacturing Framework (DEMAP).  This set of technological objectives is based on the materialization of the decentralized production concept that e-CUSTOM promotes. Following the design of the highly customized products from Pylon I, the required supply and manufacturing schemes for its production will be generated and verified by the developments of Pylon II. 

Pylon III: Environmental Assessment Module.  The environmental impact of the supply/ manufacturing schemes that will be generated in Pylon II will be among the most critical parameters for the selection of the most appropriate ones.  e-CUSTOM will develop the required tools and metrics for the evaluation of the alternative schemes.  These tools will be supplemented by advanced Knowledge Management techniques so that the generated knowledge can be systematically re-used in future projects.

Pylon IV: Network Infrastructure and Integration.  To successfully implement the e-CUSTOM decentralized manufacturing concept, the objectives under Pylon IV, will focus on creating the required infrastructures in terms of network and ICT technologies for the standardization of data exchange, the synchronous and asynchronous cooperation and communication among individuals and user groups, the efficient administration of personalised data files, the automated generation of supplying schemes and the evaluation of alternative ones . 

These innovations are estimated to be reducing energy consumption by approximately 5%-10%, transportation costs by up to 20%, the cost of raw materials by  roughly 5%-10% , time-to-market by up to 15% and delivery time by approximately 15%-20%, thus resulting in increasing the market share by up to 10%.