It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon
Where have you been? It’s been a minute and you missed so much at Kijenzi. We took a long sprint with our friends at FCDO Frontier Live Streaming and we have learned a lot!
· Structurally there have been some great changes at Kijenzi. We welcomed Sue Wanjiku as our new Business Development Manager!
· We expanded our office at LakeHub in Kisumu and even upped our interior decoration thanks to Soi Pallet Designs.
· We have also added significant capability on the SLA front (stereolithography) which can be used to create accurate, watertight prototypes and parts in a range of materials.
· Lastly, we grew our external coding and marketing teams.
On the financial front, Kijenzi expanded its relationship with Ben Franklin Technology Partners and began a new one with the Garber Venture Capital Fund. Thanks to them, we have some room to grow and innovate.
Now let’s get to the heart of the matter. What have we been doing and more importantly what are we learning? We were running 6 experiments at once — hint to those following our journey or starting their own, 6 is too many (we decided to scope it down to 5 and carry one over to next sprint); and we decided to take a longer sprint to accomplish these — hint to those same folks, keep it short and sweet. Let’s take a quick look at what we have been doing and what we learned.
· Our most successful FTL work this sprint was led by Simon around getting the first phase of our ERP system ready for internal launch. With the help of some outside consulting, we are launching the system and can’t wait to detail lessons learned in the roll out. We are developing customizations to the open source ERPNext that will allow us to manage our sales engine, ordering, engineering ecosystem, quality engineering processes, manufacturing, and finances all in one tool. The initial phase will focus on sales, ordering, engineering, and the pre-manufacturing part of the quality system. Just to reiterate from the last post, ask us why we picked ERPNext or how to get going, we’d love to talk. The lessons learned are too numerous for a post. We are excited that the open source nature will allow us to help others raise the quality of the entire local manufacturing ecosystem.
· We spent a lot of time this sprint understanding the prosthetics and orthotics ecosystem in Kenya and how digital manufacturing could support it. We are not the first with this intention, but we are the first to come in without our own product. Instead, Kijenzi is looking to be the local manufacturer for others’ products. What we learned is that there is a very much pre-scribed process that works very well. New products and services need to fit into that system and enable clinicians to do what they do best — work with patients to understand what products they need and then fit those products to them. Kijenzi is excited to work with prosthetics and orthotics companies from around the world with products that can be manufactured using digital manufacturing. While we are excited to impact this market, it does seem that there are few if any products that are ready for digital manufacturing in the Kenyan market today.
· As part of our preparation to enter the prosthetics and orthotics market, we took the time to better understand potential funding opportunities to kickstart the ecosystem. We look forward to collaborating with those who believe greater choice for patients and decreased reliance on foreign supply chains will improve service delivery in this industry.
· We began our first discussions with companies to take on contract manufacturing. The key difference here is that, instead of manufacturing just a 3D printed product for a company (or 1,000 printed parts), we will instead be taking on the manufacture of multiple components (by us and others), the assembly of them into a final product, and the delivery of them as needed. This is an exciting expansion of our work flow but it builds heavily on the quality systems and manufacturing process management that we already have in place. We have done this now on a couple small orders, and we are in talks with companies to do our first high volume delivery.
So, what is the big learning as we approach 10 months of sprints with FTL? Sprints are actually just a marathon broken up into a series of dashes or intervals. You need to catch your breath when you can, know why you are doing it, and focus on getting better. To continue the running analogy, so far, we are running negative splits (we are getting better each time). Until next time …
