Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Manufacturing Silos: Mass Production vs Mass Customization

22 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:28

In this monologue, the speaker critiques the traditional manufacturing organization that mirrors the era of the Ford Model T, where departments operate in isolated silos—engineering, sales, operations, and service—each with its own systems, data formats, languages, and cultural approaches. While such siloed specialization supports mass production, it hampers the ability to deliver mass customization, a growing demand from both B2C and B2B customers who now expect personalized products. The speaker highlights the core challenge: reconciling a structure built for uniform, high‑volume output with the need for cross‑functional collaboration to meet individualized customer requirements.

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If you think about it, in manufacturing, we really still organize as if we were selling Ford Model Ts. We have different departments which are siloed, doing their own thing. Great for specialization, which is one of the things you need for mass production, but not great for if you want to do cross-functional things. So, you have engineering departments and sales departments and manufacturing operations departments and service departments that are all within their own silos with their own systems and data formats and how they approach things, even different languages and culture, which makes it difficult for them to collaborate when doing this. So that's one of the challenges in itself in the sense that you're set up for mass production, but you're trying to do mass customization. And the reason why we have this mass customization issue is that you really have an increase in both B2C and B2B customers looking for customization and personalization. It's something that all of us as individuals have come to expect, that we can get what we want the way we want it. So then you have a situation of how do you meet that requirement then as a manufacturer organized the way you are?