Channel: Stanford Online

Category: Education

Tags: stanford onlinejonathan shapiropackagingcustomization workflowcolloquium on computer systemse-commerce listing management at scaledigitally driven manufacturingautomationorder handlingee380computer systemsorder trackingsoftware-driven digital productionfulfillmentmanufacturing operation

Description: Jonathan Shapiro Buttonsmith Inc. February 23, 2022 The US production economy was laid to rest in a cargo container in the 1970s. Deprived of a sustainable business model by globalization, a sector built on mass production and high labor costs started 50 years of unrelenting, rapid decline. If we are to have a viable economy, a middle class, or continued coherent function as a nation, a sustainable and profitable model for production (probably more than one) is needed. Printing wasn't reinvented by automating movable type. It took a systemic reimagining of personal computers, display technologies, interactive typesetting, word processing, printing, digital font design, and much more. E-commerce driven, on-demand, customizable products require a similarly broad reinvention, and are one of the most promising models for future manufacturing. But what does this look like in practice, and what role will be played by software and hardware automation? Over the last seven years, Buttonsmith has built the supporting automation and software to manufacture on-demand customizable products cost effectively at scale. It starts with reimagining production processes and methods for sustained single-piece flow. We build parameterized product designs, proceeding through customization workflow, e-Commerce listing management at scale, order handling, software-driven digital production and order tracking, packaging, and fulfillment. Lacking exemplars, we set up a prototype manufacturing operation to validate and quantify the processes and software and their revenue impact. Today, we manufacture customizable products in 6 wall clock minutes and 3 labor minutes per unit, from scratch, at about 5.6 times conventional margins, in quantity one. We are making our first foray into robotics this year. Our prototype manufacturing group has allowed us to grow at 85%+ per year, organically, while incurring the cost of a software team, in an industry whose organic growth rate averages only 15% a year without the software team. In multiple product areas, we maintain the largest pool of active designs in the world, which would be impossible in a mass-production approach. We carry essentially no finished inventory. This talk will describe some of the conceptual and technical challenges we have needed to solve, the choices we made to solve them, several things manufacturers know that ain't so, the astonishing cost of "transportation steps", and what we believe the future of first-world manufacturing will look like. View the full playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu