CRUISING AND PUMPING (OUT) HANDS
What a whirlwind the last couple months have been at Kijenzi! While I know readers are tuning in to hear about the goings on in the business, the lives of Kijenzi’s people are definitely worthy of top billing. Just look at this craziness within one sprint:
· David (with most credit due to Tina) allowed us all to welcome Tyrell into the world.
· Ben and Cait (really credit needs to go to Ben as he is leveling up) ran off and got married.
· We welcomed Joel and Chaka to the Kijenzi family as part of our engineering outreach team.
· Magdalia and Alex graduated from their university programs.
· Simon made a big decision (let’s just repeat that there is some leveling up going on there).
· John watched his son graduate and got so excited that he broke his ankle.
· Daisy and Elvis logged a record number of miles in meeting new customers.
Wow!
But we didn’t let all that stop us from going big with our latest collaborations with the Frontier Technologies Programme. This time we focused more on setting the table for the next sprint — getting ready to do great things. While that sounds like small tasks, it led to great learnings.
That new SLA process we talked about last time? We got good at it and we can’t wait to show off what we can do with it next sprint. When you have really only one manufacturing process for 3 years and then add a second, the key is not the process; it is the process introduction. Now that we know how to introduce new processes and have created a repeatable playbook for it, we have the confidence to add additional processes as markets demand.
We were able to test out the quality processes that we worked on so hard and we are eager to share the what and how of our processes. We found that we were able to develop an efficient and repeatable process for remote engineers to follow and get consistent outputs from. This will allow us to add it to our company-wide platform to gain even greater efficiencies. Magdalia turned our work into a thesis (actually she did too much work to fit into a thesis so she had to pick just a piece of what we did). So please contact us and we would love to share the work with you if you are trying to figure out how to create quality control processes for distributed, digital manufacturing.
We also began some of the most important work that Kijenzi is doing as we made a decision to work with ERPNext, an open source enterprise resource planning platform upon which we can build and connect all of the core functions of our organization including, the centralized engineering and quality control that is key to Kijenzi’s process model with the distributed customer servicing and manufacturing that is key to Kijenzi’s impact. If you want to know how and why we selected ERPNext over the hundreds of potential softwares out there, please reach out as we would love to share that learning with any smaller social venture that needs to keep track of a growing business.
However, this collaboration was not all roses and puppy dogs. We had a real surprise experiment failure in our attempt to gain some understanding of new market segments. Up until now, Kijenzi’s market segmentation work can best be described as shaking hands and kissing babies. We have gone from individual customer to individual customer in an attempt to make anything people want. That led to a great understanding of what we can and should be doing — i.e., what is both profitable and impactful. But that process is slow. We then decided to take our knowledge of the different types of customers and different types of products that fall into that “can and should” category and look to industry leaders to help us better understand the wider possibilities. What we learned is that often people at the top lack the time and knowledge of the day to day to have a meaningful input on the sorts of things Kijenzi makes. So what is a startup to do? Shut down the experiment, regroup, and drill down. Look for our next post as we talk about how we are going to drill down into the prosthetics and orthotics (P&O) market.
Speaking of the P&O market… it’s time to give ourselves a hand for some great work. Actually, Kijenzi made hands for Nayla Prosthetics, an innovative prosthetic development firm in Sudan looking to change the market with highly functional prosthetic hands. In just 48 hours, we were able to take their final design, manufacture over a dozen hands (150 separate prints), put them all through our quality control process, and put them in boxes. Two days later, they were part of a trial for youth in Sudan. We can’t wait to manufacture these in larger volumes!
Until next time, I will leave you with two bits of Kijenzi trivia.
· Most of the Kijenzi family has spent time at either Kenyatta University or Penn State University.
· We had a week during this sprint where the company was 100% virtual — meaning no two employees met live face to face the entire week.
