Industrial Productivity on a Small Scale

Can Distributed Production in Microfactories be More Efficient than Centralized Production?

Can a distributed open source business with distributed production provide higher efficiencies than centralized production?

This is important, as at stake is the capacity to educate for entrepreneurship as opposed to creating employees. Why is that good? As long as we can maintain industrial productivity with this method - we have more flexibility in terms of doing things with environmental and social consciousness. By doing this, we decrease bureaucracy. Increase meaning and satisfaction in peoples' lives. Contribute to creation of the world around us as opposed to creation of oversized structures.

Let's look at some data:

1. Prusa Research sells 8000 printers per month, with 250 employees. That is 1 printer per person per day.
2. Lulzbot - sells 1000 pritners per month, with 150 employees. That is 1/5 printer per person per day.
3. Mahindra & Mahindra Tractors - make 1/6 tractor per person per day. Thousands of employees in their tractor division.
4. Contractors build a house in 5 months

For comparison:

1. OSE can make 12 quality controlled-printer kits per day, with Distributed Quality Control. See 3D Printer Production Engineering. Combinded with the Extreme Manufacturing workshops (1 day), customer cupport, and marketing (publishing events + standard marketing procedures) - the effort is 4 days per 12 3D printers, or 3 printers per day.
2. OSE can make 1 tractor in one day with 4 people. So this is 1/4 tractor per person per day.
3. OSE builds a house in 5 days.

Discussion

While OSE is not producing a large number of printers in a centralized location, its small volume Extreme Manufacturing can yield good efficiency on a small scale. The question remains - can such production be replicated by people other than the elite squadrons of OSE? Second, can such production scale? Can the combined effect of many producers distribute wealth more, educate more people, empower more people - and do better in innovation and true service of human needs?

Our route to that is training people to run such businesses, to fund growth of OSE development. Our goal is Funding the Revolution. To succeed at this means succeeding at providing livelihoods for the transformation of the economy- to a system based on open source collaboration. This has the potential to unleash much creativity - raising the bar on human life satisfaction as various forms of competitive waste are eliminated. From the OSE big picture perspective, this has the potential to add freeDom to Peter Diamandis's 6 Ds of Tech Disruption.

Efficiencies of centralized production appear to be created by specialization - and are the proclaimed gospel for success, but the numbers don't seem to add up. Considering that OSE has a theoretical efficiency 3x that of Prusa Research - our work indicates otherwise. So we are pursing the fleshing out of this business model to show a landmark case for Distributed Production.

Distributed vs Centralized Production

As such, we are embarking on an experiment to determine whether simple open source design, distributed production, distributed quality control, and education can provide a better economic model of production. This relies on creating tools to empower people, and providing livelihood consistent with Nonviolence. We think that this is worth doing..

Why has industrial productivity not been achieved in the Maker Movement?

Here are common reasons and shortcomings of the maker movement:

1. There are few to none good open product designs that can be produced readily with well-documented or replicable open source production engineering. OSE stuff included - we're missing the last steps of distributed production engineering which we are just now completing.
2. There are NO quality open source, replicable tools that get you to the industrial productivity on a small scale. We're working on it. For example, the 3D printer still needs a high temperature enclosure (170C) and a rubber-optimized 3mm extruder for 3D printers to access industrial productivity.
3. Enclosure of projects once they reach a productization stage
4. Marketing and distribution has not been developed for open source. OSE is working on addressing this with the STEAM Camps and Incentive Challenges.
5. Open source toolchain training is missing. Fab Academy comes close, but they rely primarily on proprietary toolchains. We're working to address this with the STEAM Camps.