OVER THE FIRST HURDLE WITH NARY A WOBBLE
With a first sprint under their belt and a bit of confidence in the process, we at Kijenzi hoped to follow up on previous successes and learnings and begin to use the next sprint to create more opportunities.
Kijenzi finished its first year of operating a digital manufacturing hub with nearly 10,000 units produced on its 18 3D printers. While that is a start, there is much yet to be tested before we can definitively state that networked, distributed manufacturing is a scalable and sustainable model for localising production. Our work with the Frontier Technologies Programme is focused on some of the core questions of sustainability — proving the market, and developing processes that increase efficiency.
Before I get to the details of the recent work, a few more interesting facts about Kijenzi:
- Kijenzi began thinking that the solution to distributed manufacturing was the creation of purpose built printers, a notion that proved to miss the heart of the problem (printers were rugged enough and user friendly, but the parts, maintenance, and availability of printable designs were lacking along with a scalable business model for their use) — that’s how we pivot.
- The Kijenzi logo was originally designed in powerpoint. By the time we thought to revisit it professionally, the logo was already on everything and there was no going back.
-Kijenzi spent part of its incubation time working within Penn State University’s Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship program. This allowed them to do all of their early testing in Kenya full time.
Our second sprint has focused on three main areas: 1) codifying quality control processes; 2) mapping our potential customer segments; 3) open up new markets through SLA printing capability.
1) Codifying quality control processes
One of Kijenzi’s key differentiators is our focus on quality control, so we care deeply about codifying the processes. For this sprint, we’ve expanded our process codification to projects. Kijenzi classifies projects as when the customer does not have a ready-to-print product or is not purchasing a product from our catalog. Instead, Kijenzi engineers work with the client to get their products or product ideas manufacturing ready. This process has more steps and gates, and codifying the process is what allows us to ensure a quality product every time. One of the big takeaways from the testing of project designs was an easy to use clickable form that allows test engineers to have access to the test procedures and the data input form for any test we perform all in a one page document that automatically submits data to our engineering data system.
2) Mapping our potential customer segments
As mentioned, improving the understanding of the market and what needs 3D printing can meet is core to this pilot. To advance the early work with Wild Saffron, Kijenzi set out on a series of exercises to slice and dice the market space and set ourselves up to test who needs us most. The short version is that organisations with regional or national reach are more likely customers, especially when they have a need to increase production volumes, build local resilience, and obtain products that are unavailable to them.
3) Open up new markets through SLA printing capability
Another exciting piece is that Kijenzi took the first of many steps to improve its product capability by bringing SLA printing (stereolithography) to their hubs. Our new Prusa SL1s along with the curing and washing machine just hit our hub in Kisumu. We can now make much smoother, more continuous products with higher resolution. That being said, we have also moved our SLA process to our “clean room” operations given that the process is much more sensitive to both dirt and light. More updates on the final set up after we have made products for customers. We are looking to see next which new products organizations request with this new technology.
Just one last note — we are now in Mombasa as well as Kisumu. Know someone that needs manufacturing services? Get in touch with us: info@kijenzi.com, +254 718 437 415.
