What can you say about this article? Is Adidas process costing really works in doing customize shoes for customers?

Concepts in Action Hybrid Costing for Customized Shoes at Adidas Adidas has been designing and manufacturing athletic footwear for nearly mi 90 years. Although shoemakers have long individually crafted shoes for profes- sional athletes like Reggie Bush of the New Orleans Saints, Adidas took this concept a step further when it initiated the mi adidas program. Mi adidas gives customers the opportunity to create shoes to their exact personal specifications for function, fit, and aesthetics. Mi adidas is available in retail stores around the world, and in special mi adidas "Performance Stores" in cities such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The process works as follows: The customer goes to a mi adidas station, where a salesperson develops an in-depth customer profile, a 3-D computer scanner develops a scan of the customer's feet, and the customer selects from among 90 to 100 different styles and colors for his or her modularly designed shoe. During the three-step, 30-minute high-tech process, mi adidas experts take 0 - 10 customers through the "mi fit," "mi performance," and "mi design" phases, resulting in a customized shoe to fit their needs. The resulting data are trans- ferred to an Adidas plant, where small, multiskilled teams produce the cus- tomized shoe. The measuring and fitting process is free, but purchasing your own specially made shoes costs between $40 and $65 on top of the normal retail price, depending on the style. Historically, costs associated with individually customized products have fallen into the domain of job cost- ing. Adidas, however, uses a hybrid-costing system-job costing for the material and customizable components that customers choose and process costing to account for the conversion costs of production. The cost of mak- ing each pair of shoes is calculated by accumulating all production costs and dividing by the number of shoes made. In other words, even though each pair of shoes is different, the conversion cost of each pair is assumed to be the same. The combination of customization with certain features of mass production is called mass customization. It is the consequence of being able to digitize information that individual customers indicate is important to them. Various products that companies are now able to customize within a mass-production setting (for example, personal comput- ers, blue jeans, bicycles) still require job costing of materials and considerable human intervention. However, as man- ufacturing systems become flexible, companies are also using process costing to account for the standardized conversion costs