Can supply chain made simpler with on-demand manufacturing?

One of the challenges for launching products by individual designers and small firms is to setup and manage their supply chain. Launching a product from an idea is not easy. There are many things to take into account. A short list in context of 3D printing and on-demand manufacturing:

• online fabrication services are useful, but cover only part of the process
• a product needs to be assembled, finished and packaged before it is ready
• order fulfillment and distribution is a lot of work and very repetitive
• to get orders you need to have sales channels.

What I wanted to get across in that post is that beyond a product idea, to launch an actual product into the market is quite some work. You need to be prepared to contribute a significant amount of your time to bring a product to market.

That is looking at it from the individual designer perspective. For larger companies on-demand manufacturing gives opportunities to simplify their supply chain. I wrote about that in my post Impact of 3D Printing on Supply Chain.

One of the major challenges for individual and small companies for launching products is supply chain. To find, select and manage a small number of suppliers to manufacture and assemble your product is a challenge.

To get a product manufactured parts need to sourced. This could either be off-the-shelf parts or custom-manufactured parts. These parts are manufactured and shipped to the assembly point. At the assembly point, the product is put together, packaged and shipped. In each step of the manufacturing process, the reliability and quality of parts and product needs to be checked and monitored.

When the manufacturing and logistics of the product are set up, there are stock levels to monitor. The manufacturing of products overseas can take up to 6 weeks before the actual product arrives. The product designer needs to make choices on how much stock to keep and the size of production batches while taken into account the lead time of each of his suppliers.

Even for simple products like porcelain cups, this can be quite an undertaking.

It is a well-known secret that lots of product projects at Kickstarter fail just for that reason. Even though, the projects are successfully funded, the project owners can’t get the production up and running. It proves that many product designers just underestimate the amount effort necessary to setup and maintain a supply chain. According to a study done by professor Ethan Mollick 75% of technology and design-related projects at Kickstarter fail to deliver on time.

The interesting aspect is that every product designer / small firm is doing the same work and repeating the effort across markets and products. Even with the advent of on-demand manufacturing, the supply chain still exists and needs to be managed. The amount of effort the product designer needs to put in into the supply chain goes beyond the effort of designing the product itself.

There is an opportunity in the market for making supply chain simpler for product designers and small firms. There is a definite need for full-service manufacturing and logistic companies who take over the effort and let the product designer outsource the supply chain.