Massive Small Manufacturing — why it matters
What Massive Small Manufacturing means to me is a return to the making of things in communities. Instead of being made far away, in massive batches, and shipped to where they are needed, things can be made in small quantities close to where they will be used. ‘Things’ can be anything. Stuff. Physical products. Chairs, clothes, medical implements, drones, cooking pots, solar panels. I’m mainly interested in the manufacturing of useful things, technologies that help us to live a healthy productive life free of drudgery.
So ‘small’ refers to the scale of each individual manufacturing operation, and ‘massive’ refers to the idea that this model is replicated on a massive scale. It’s a term that to me has more soul than the rather technocratic ‘decentralized manufacturing’, which is also a pretty accurate (and more common) way of describing what I’m talking about.
I want to explain why I think Massive Small Manufacturing is a good idea. I’ve been trying, and failing, to write this post for weeks. I haven’t got writers’ block. Whenever I sit down and write, words pour out enthusiastically. I get halfway through explaining an idea, then I think of another concept that is related in some way, and I move on to that. The writing is like a linear record of the tangled mess of ideas that I’m picking over in my mind — I pull at a random bit of thread for a while, without finding out what (if anything) it is joined on to, and then I move on to another bit. To be honest, this muddle I have in my head around the whole concept is a big part of why I want to write these articles, as it will force me to bring some structure to it.
Five years ago I was working as a consultant to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. My job involved working out how to design supply chains that can reliably get medicines to the people who need them, spread out across some of the poorest countries on earth. Places that may not have much of the kind of supply chain infrastructure that the West relies on — roads, bridges, ports, temperature controlled trucks and warehouses. More subtly, where there is often far less investment in processes like import procedures, warehouse management systems so you know how much of what you have where, the collecting of consumption data so you have early warning of changes in demand. In such situations it is impossible to know with any degree of accuracy either how many of what kind of product you will need where, or how long it will take to get them there.
Supply chains can be designed to deal with such high levels of uncertainty, but without going into too much detail about how you do that, whatever approach you take adds cost. The status quo of globalised supply chains is basically that they get products fairly quickly and cheaply to people in developed countries, and slowly and expensively to people in developing countries.
Around the same time that I was working on these supply chain challenges, I was aware of the spread of digital manufacturing technologies like 3D printing and laser cutting. These techniques offer the possibility to email a design file, and if you have the right kind of machine plus a person skilled in operating it and the right materials, you can create a product anywhere. I started to think that the focus on shipping stuff around the world isn’t where the future is at.
And so after almost a decade working on global supply chains I shifted tack in my career to figuring out how we can make more stuff locally. This question too has its fair share of complexities (probably an understatement). But I’ll leave a discussion of the practicalities for another time — for now I want to lay out why I think it’s so worthwhile to figure our way past the challenges and make local manufacturing work, especially in developing countries, but ultimately everywhere. There are four main reasons.
1. Access
To improve the quality of life for the roughly half of humanity that lack reliable access to clean drinking water, enough food, adequate sanitation, and basic health care — we need to improve their access to products. Water filters, agricultural implements, soap, medicines and medical devices are all physical things that need somehow to get to where people live. The reasons why technological solutions that would help people are not available in many of the places where people need them are of course extremely complex — but they include the intertwined reasons of supply chains and costs (intertwined because less effective supply chains deliver things at higher cost, meaning fewer people can afford them). Local manufacturing is definitely not a panacea, but it can — and needs to — form a part of the solution.
2. Jobs
Aid agencies spend millions upon millions of dollars every year on buying stuff, and millions more moving that stuff to where it is needed. What if they bought more of what they need from businesses in the communities they want to help? Not only would it be easier to get the products where they want them, and to get the right products, but it would also help to create jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities in those communities, and — crucially — leave them far better placed to graduate from needing aid in the future.
3. Better products
Once you’re making products locally, you can start to adapt them so they are more suited to local conditions. Humanity is varied and it turns out that one size doesn’t, in fact, fit all. There are stories of stretchers used in disaster relief efforts that are too short for the local population, and I know of hospital trolleys in Kenya that are too high. When products are being made closer to their users, manufacturers know their customers far better, and users can contribute to innovating on the products for their needs. One of my favourite examples is the treadle pump popularised in India by International Development Enterprises. They created a range of variants on the product design to make it suitable for local conditions (e.g. using a different material for the pump block in coastal areas where salinity in the soil is higher, to avoid corrosion) or take advantage of what materials are available in different locations (e.g. making the frame out of bamboo in the areas where it is plentiful, instead of metal). All the designs were functionally equivalent, but optimised for the local situation.
It is not ideal for any of us to be passive recipients of products that are designed without our specific needs in mind. The problem is far worse in places that are not considered important markets by global manufacturers, where products are often quite unsuitable (those same hospital trolleys in Kenya that were too high — they also have wheels designed for perfectly smooth floors, which break quickly when they meet uneven surfaces).
4. Environment
There are three sources of environmental advantage to local manufacturing. The first is the obvious reduction in transport. Even if you still transport a key piece of a product from far away — a microchip or a circuit board perhaps, that is more sensibly made in larger volume — you can save a lot in emissions (not to mention cost) by not moving fully assembled products. Secondly, repair, recycling, and other circular economy strategies tend to be easier and more cost-effective when the products have not travelled far from the manufacturer. The third source of potential advantage is not a given, but manufacturing things locally can offer the opportunity to use more earth-friendly materials that are available locally, such as in the treadle pump example given above.
Taken together, for me these reasons make a compelling case for investing in figuring out how to make Massive Small Manufacturing work. A lot of people seem to agree — when I tell people about what I’m working on, no-one has yet said ‘that’s a terrible idea’. What they do say is that they think it’s impossible or impractical. The most common objection people raise is to assume that local manufacturing costs more. They say you need economies of scale to make manufacturing competitive. That often isn’t in fact the case — but I will leave that topic for another article. For now I just want to say that to me, local manufacturing IS the way forwards. Not for everything, but for way more things than it is currently used for.
The bigger challenge that I see is how to make locally manufactured goods high quality and attractive. Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they want products that are sub-standard — or even that are reasonable quality but look old-fashioned. The African manufacturing businesses I have seen be really successful with their products are those that place a lot of importance on design as well as on quality. Particularly for consumer products, stylish design is often taken as a proxy for quality. This can pose a challenge to the idea that products can be made using locally available materials — in many places, people see plastic or metal as a more modern, and therefore desirable, alternative to local materials.
For me this is not about turning back globalisation — it’s about moving to the next stage of it, enabled by the technologies we now have. Materials and some products will still need to be shipped around the globe. But by developing the right business models (for all stages in the value chain), and enabling easy access to the global knowledge pool, we do have an opportunity to create a manufacturing ecosystem that better meets the needs of the majority of people, and also the planet.
