OUT OF THE BLOCKS AND UP TO SPEED
This is the continuing story of Kijenzi — a Kenyan social venture democratizing manufacturing by creating a network of local digital manufacturing hubs. Kijenzi supports these hubs with a central engineering and quality control capability that allows them to consistently produce a wide variety of high quality products for customers all over the region.
Some interesting facts about Kijenzi for those who do not know us well:
- we started out developing a mobile 3D printer for humanitarian crisis use;
- we have begun out of Kisumu, Kenya a city in which the co-founders have long ties and a city ripe for entrepreneurship;
- the Kijenzi team splits nearly evenly between beans/ndengu and rice/chapati, but you should add one banana and a table of fruit smoothies to keep the entire crew happy.
After a couple of months of paperwork and a couple months of planning Kijenzi has launched its first phase of the Frontier Technologies Livestreaming (FTL) pilot. For the first phase we are working in four key areas of Kijenzi — 1) Initial work towards developing a marketing plan, 2) A better understanding of the possible business models in front of us, 3) Codifying and testing our quality assurance process for catalog products, and 4) Codifying and testing our ordering process for catalog products.
Working closely with Wild Saffron Solutions, we are enlisting current customers and contacts to better understand how we can reach them and others like them. As a company born of engineers, it is fantastic (and long overdue) to bring a marketing professional into the company. Daisy Achieng has been instrumental in making this work happen on the Kijenzi side.
The FTL team have been great partners throughout the planning phase and as well the doing, especially in making connections to explore potential business models. The first phase was all about the pros and cons of franchising models in the region.
For codifying our processes, Kijenzi team members Mags Campobasso and Alenna Beroza have led our development and testing of a repeatable process to get quality testing done, process orders, and collect data throughout. Thanks to work with Simon Lipsky as well, all three of our engineers are busy planning for a future of a hundred manufacturing hubs all sharing data and operating seamlessly.
Here is what we’ve learned from our first sprint:
1. Franchising of services is far less common and potentially more difficult than one would expect in Kenya
Interviews with several consultants led to our conclusion that there is a general lack of regional franchising outside of prepared food franchising and clothing brand retail stores coming from outside Kenya. General gleanings were centered on the lack of franchising specific laws, the inability to enforce them and low adherence to franchising structure and processes, the difficulty of repossessing equipment, the expense and difficulty of training, and the need for complete uniqueness and brand awareness. Based on all of these, we are reconsidering the traditional franchising model and acknowledge that our model will need to be much more tailored.
2. Our customers are very willing to help us succeed in this market
We have been impressed with how involved our existing customers have been in providing us with insight on their needs and wants with regard to our products.
3. Manufacturing quality is a game changing capability
In order to increase the efficiency of product testing, we codified the process for quality control and testing of a design and documented them in the Product Development Manual. The process was tested by applying it to one occupational therapy device and one spare part and by conducting user testing within our team.
We realised during this sprint that tracking messages was not a suitable way of measuring proof at this stage. This was partly because one of the products was put on hold instead of completing the process.
4. Process uniformity is difficult to achieve in a business that involves custom products
Again to improve its efficiency, we codified the entire order process from order-intake to order-completion for what we refer to as ‘Catalog and Custom’ orders. The new process was tested with two incoming orders (1 catalog and 1 custom) and the process deviations were recorded. User testing was completed with Kijenzi employees for usability.
