Product personalization respectively product individualization promises the exact fulfillment of individual requirements for each customer. In contrast to the customer benefit, a company has to deal with numerous internal product and process modifications due to repeated, customer-specific product adaptions. In this context, product adaptions can affect one or more product characteristics whose attributes need to be adapted according to individual needs. At this point, it is essential to understand and evaluate the personalization workload and the resulting costs caused by a specific adaption of a product characteristics’ attribute. So far, the literature offers little support in the cost-based evaluation of potentially personalization-relevant product characteristics. What is missing is the evaluation of the cost increase, if, instead of variant and customer-anonymously developed attributes, now individualized, customer-specific attributes would be realized. Therefore, a framework for a characteristic-oriented complexity cost analysis for the evaluation of customer-specific attributes is developed in this paper to support the decision-making process for or against the personalization of a product characteristic.
