Micro Manufacturing

How it works

So, manufacturing: it's supposed to be scalable, easy to make things quickly, and produce massive numbers of items in fractions of hours. This model has been tried in many industries and has had mixed results. Let's look at the one I'm most familiar with: technology.Take a web server for instance: we used to keep these all as one big server that handled all the requests and gave out responses to those requests. It would handle everything, including images, videos, etc. until it couldn't handle it anymore. This system worked while traffic was low, but once traffic picked up the servers couldn't handle the load and it would delay all the responses. To compensate, devs started making multiple servers and practicing load balancing across all the servers. This gives us something similar to what we have now: smaller servers (hosted in the cloud, but that's out of scope for this blog) that get requests when they can handle it, and start up more servers when they run out of the ability to handle them, allowing tech to handle much larger loads of traffic without falling over. It also creates redundancy incase one of the servers goes down, or something else breaks.

SO HOW DOES THIS HELP?

Well, tech is pretty much the trailblazer for everything you'd ever have. They're the first to adapt and change to pretty much anything, but other industries are not. Let's use this logic here, but for making things instead of responses. Manufacturers have large, centralized factories like tech servers, but they're large enough that it starts to become a problem for smaller businesses. You can either have billion dollar plants or hundred dollar made-by-hand workshops, and not much in between.I aim to take the same features that work well with cloud computing (scalable, cheap, adaptable, fault tolerant) and apply it to making products. We have thousands of hobbyists with consumer grade 3D printers, injection molders, laser cutters, and CNC machines, but they're not linked together in any meaningful way. They sit in the corner of rooms until someone gets inspired, then they go thru a design step, a print step, and assembly. We can look at how computers work to get a decent feel for the model that could work here.

Enter the Micro-Manufacturing Model

When you have an idea for a product, you create a build guide for others to follow. That guide will show the glue points, tools needed, etc. and then you publish this to others. Each maker will create a 4 digit maker code for themselves and tag it onto the end of the model number for tracing, and then each maker gets to decide if they want to print, assemble, design, or some other role (or handle multiple other roles) and each maker gets commission on sold items, makes a quota of products each week that they want to make some extra money, and then you get a chance to use your printers, cutters, etc.

This will start as a social media community until a dashboard could be built around it. Designers and makers will publish the tools needed to assemble the products and charts for quality assurance, and individual makers will need to connect with the designers to fulfill orders from the stores.

To contribute, join the facebook or subreddit