高级综合商务英语1-Unit-7-Mass-customization-彭青龙

Part I Questions about Part I
❖Q1. What’s the main idea of Part I (Para. 1-4)? ❖BMW used mass customization to promote its
sales as a handy marketing device and to inject flexibility into almost every aspect of the company, particularly, manifested by its ability to cater for fickle customer desires and its rhythm of work.
Unit Seven
Mass Customization
1. Lead-in 2. Text A: BMW Drives Germany 3. Text B: How Mass Customization Is
Changing Our World
Lead-in
Байду номын сангаас
Case Study
❖MyMuesli, the manufacturer of cereal food, enables the users to customize a food product through online interaction.
❖Q2: Is there any solution to this problem?
Q3: What lessons of potential risks of customization can be learnt from this case?
Q4: In your opinion, what products are more suitable for mass customization?
Part I Sentence Interpretation
❖Q1. What is “customization”? Do you like MyMuesli’s customizing its cereal food? Why or why not?
❖However, the company neglected robust processes of mass customization. Whenever a report on customers’ favor was published, the manufacturing capacity was insufficient. For lack of human labor mixing muesli from about 65 different categories of options by hand, the company had to turn down prospective customers by setting a daily order limit.
❖2) A number of challenges can arise for a company to manage a heavily unionized workforce, especially because of lack of flexibility. Union workers often work set hours, and they must take a certain number of breaks during the day, no matter how heavy or how light the workload. Deals BMW struck with its workforce enabled it to bring in new ways of working and manage its workforce more or less in accordance with production demands.
Text A BMW Drives Germany
Structural Analysis
Para. Para. 1-4
Main Topics
BMW’s mass customization used as a marketing device and an effective means of injecting flexibility into BMW.
❖Q2. What does “heavily unionized workforce” mean? What changes have been brought about by the deals BMW struck with its workforce?
❖1) A union is a group of workers who have come together to make collective decisions about their work and their working conditions. Heavily unionized workforce means that a relatively high proportion of employees belong to a union.
Para. 5-8 BMW symbolic of German economy
Para. 9-11 BMW’s highly automated Leipzig plant conducive to mass customization
Para. 12-18 BMW’s attempt to handle the key issues of mass customization: workforce flexibility, production capacity expansion, product-line expansion.