Engineers at Richard Childress Racing near Charlotte wanted to duplicate an engine part that was performing especially well last year on Kevin Harvick's No. 29 Nextel Cup car.

That used to require a machinist spending days painstakingly working the metal part by hand. This time, the NASCAR team engineers tried software from Geomagic, the small Research Triangle Park company. Geomagic's software captured the part in a digital, 3-D image, which guided a machine to produce a precise replica.

The process is an example of mass customization, part of a broader trend toward faster, more specialized manufacturing. The customizing concept, conceived of decades ago, is to crank out one-of-a-kind, custom-fit goods at mass-production prices.

Examples include personalized M&Ms and Dell's build-your-own computers, but the potential is much greater. A custom-fit future could include shoes made just for you and factories churning out goods that are already sold -- not wasting money stockpiling stuff that might never be needed.

Consumers and business are likely winners, but supporters disagree about whether mass customization can help save U.S. factory jobs from lower-cost foreign workers. That's an important debate in the Carolinas, which have hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, but where factories still employ more than one in seven workers.

Geomagic plays a key role in the trend. The company's software translates complex measurements into patterns for production. Customers include racing teams, major automakers, archaeologists, dentists and medical researchers. The software has generated patterns for custom goods, such as the Richard Childress Racing engine parts, and personally fit products, such as suits, hearing aids and orthodontic braces.

The need to generate patterns is often overlooked in custom-fit discussions, said Frank Piller, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the movement's leading authorities.

"If you want an efficient customization, the critical point is to transfer the specifications into product design," Piller said. "Creating this individual design until now was very burdensome and expensive."

Geomagic, started in 1996, has about 100 workers, half at its RTP headquarters and the others at offices in seven countries. The private company doesn't release sales data, but by an industry calculation, based on employment, revenue ranges from $15 million to $20 million.

Ping Fu, who started the company with her husband, is its CEO. She said the company has been profitable since 2003. She is a sought-after speaker on customization, and she and Geomagic have made several hotshot entrepreneurial rankings. The company has two main competitors, one Canadian, the other South Korean.

"Geomagic is a significant player," said Peter Marks of Design Insight, a California product-development consultant who writes about the technology. The company, he said, has a "strong technical background and is arguably the leader in software."

Think of Geomagic's technology as capturing the world in 3-D. Scanners collect millions of tiny measurement points. Geomagic converts that information into a digital model that can direct machines to make parts. The software also is used for product analysis and designing new goods -- some of which will be mass-produced.

"We can digitize everything in our world, so we can create, modify, store, view and edit things the way we can do with music, with documents," Fu said.

Consumer demand creates a market for the technology, said Joe Pine, a management consultant and pioneer in the customization movement.

"Customers are no longer willing to accept the standard, off-the-rack offering," said Pine, co-founder of Strategic Horizons in Minnesota.

Custom manufacturing likely will never match the costs and efficiency of mass-production on the factory floor. Making 10,000 identical widgets will almost certainly remain faster than making 10,000 with variations.

But Geomagic software can help speed customizing, as it did with Richard Childress Racing. The technology cuts the measuring and calculating time for products that have many intricate, variable measurements, such as dental crowns and men's suits. Companies also could save substantially by reducing inventory, making just the goods that customers want and avoiding mounds of stuff that is eventually sold at heavy discounts.

Those savings could offset the higher wages that make the United States vulnerable to low-wage countries. Pine, Fu and others speculate that could entice jobs back to local manufacturing.

"One part of our passion is the power to bring the manufacturing back," Fu said.

That was Jud Early's mission in 1991 when he joined TC2, a nonprofit textile and apparel consortium. One of the group's goals was to use customization and automation to save apparel jobs. That failed, but the group's body scanners -- using Geomagic software -- are slowly catching on with makers of custom suits and retailers.

Customization can be great for consumers and for generating profitable new businesses, said Early, the group's chief technology officer. However, "it is not a huge job saver," he said.

For Childress Racing, Geomagic is part of the quest to win on the track. Last year, the software generated a pattern that enabled the company to replicate one of Harvick's manifolds, an engine part that delivers fuel and air. The better the mix, the better the power. Every bit helps in a sport where fractions of seconds count.

Engineers at the complex, about 70 miles northeast of Charlotte, use the software to tweak engine-part designs on the computer and generate production patterns, manufacturing manager Rick Grimes said.