This is the first in a series of posts concerning technologies that have and will enable mass customization on a large scale, or more accurately create opportunities to a broad audience. Each of the technologies we will be looking at have the potential to give normal people of normal means the ability to produce products and in some cases services in direct competition with the big boys doing classic mass production.
All of these attitudes assume that smart manufacturing tools will be the single greatest force in propelling mass customization and severely disrupting the basic value chain that manufacturing resides in today. These tools have the ability to product a nearly endless variety of products and are designed not around a particular product or material but a process.
Labor intensive manufacturing in Guangdong, China.
The future of manufacturing is smart tools or machines that are high flexible in the how they work as apposed to dumb tools which are designed for one very specific task and do it very efficiently. Today very few manufacturers use smart tools because they tend to much slower and more costly to buy and operate. This is especially true in places like China, India, Tunisia and Vietnam. These countries are the cornerstone of global manufacturing and rely heavily on cheap labor. These kinds of factories are geared toward throwing labor at a (usually low tech) production problem.
In contrast, countries that produce more sophisticated products such as Japan and Germany are leading the world in the use and creation of smart tools. These tools can adapt more quickly to innovations and also have the benefit of requiring less tooling. They also tend to work on a wide range of materials.
Home built desktop CNC machine connected to a PC.
These tools include CNC machines, laser cutters, printers, lathes and soon garment producing machines such as kitting machines. While these tools have been around for many years now the biggest advance to make them smart is the software.
The cutting bed of a laser cutter.
As software systems become both more powerful and less complex the machines that follow the softwares commands have the ability to do more astounding things. This evolution in the tool control software is just in it’s infancy right now. But like the internet and open source software have remade business, so will tool control software remake the manufacturing world.
The vision of a computerized future by IBM.
The history of computers and it’s impact on business over the last 30 years shows how transformative it has been. In the 70’s and 80’s computers and computer communication gave raise to efficient globalizations of organizations. It changed the way data was used to guide organizational decision making and broadened an employees job possibilities. This process was by no means pretty, it’s left a deep and permanent scare on the US citizens and their relationships with corporations. This transformation of business processes and models is a good indicator for what is about to happen to the manufacturing world with smart tools and mass customization.
Smart tools mean far less labor intensive products, it also means that a production facility can product a variety of things with the same set of machines. But the biggest impact will be the people participating in the manufacturing process. These tools have been and will continue to come down in price so that the advent of the casual manufacturer will begin to impact major markets. An example is the trend in Laser cutter/engravers, they are very versatile tools, require no more than a vector path (such as an adobe illustrator file) to create a product with a tolerance of .03mm, new machines are as cheap as $1600 now. Only 5 years ago you couldn’t touch a used laser cutter for under $20,000.
Additionally laser cutters used to be controlled by complex proprietary software. You would program the path or import a CAD file and adjust the path to the software. Those days are over now. Many of the laser cutters today can be controlled by Corel draw or Adobe Illustrator. Software that millions of people know how to use. And this trend will continue to the point that anyone with a little money, a laptop and an idea can produce it.
This process of smart tools coming into the hands of a broad audience means nothing if there is not desire to make things. That is the second element that will propel mass customizations and these tools into the manufacturing world. Etsy.com is a good example of what’s to come. The website is an online shop for micro manufacturers and mass customized products. The site is two years old and had 2 million visitors that did 90 million in sales in 2008 and they’re growing very fast.
Both the desire for more unique products and the mindset that anybody can make what they come up with in their heads fuel sites like Etsy.com. This trend will continue purely because smart tools will allow Mr. Smith to manufacture his dream product after work in his garage with the same precision as a multi million dollar corporation.
The smile curve show where value is created in a production process. This model developed by Stan Shih.
This trend will reflect the value that manufacturing bring to the table and adjust it to make the manufacturing process more relevant and dynamic.
Some industries apply smart tools today, the automotive industry has been at the for front in this field for many years now but they still suffer from long periods of downtime do to retooling. I believe this will virtually disappear over the next 20 years.
* Etsy.com statistics are from this wired article.
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