Curious about Shoes

Fragmented factoring part 2

The question about maximizing productivity is quite an interesting one. All of you who have ever visited a small company that produces something tangible know the strange feeling you get when you enter the factory and notice that there’s not that much going on. Modern production techniques make the once so buzzing factory floor deserted and puts  machines on standby. You could say that there is a lot of untapped capacity waiting idly for new orders to arrive.

We could go even further and say that many percent of the machines are unemployed, similar to the workforce.

Over- or under capacity is one bottleneck that hinders companies from being agile.

Could the city in itself be the remedy to all those short-comings that we just described? The most important tool to solve this problem is information. Just take a look in the yellow pages under any given craft or product and see all the variety that exist in any headline, add to that all the variety of services and products that are offered in that area. Could we help all those companies from a holistic point of view?

A system like the stock market, selling and buying production capacity would be a fitting solution; instrumented with the latest techniques concerning lean supply chains, totally integrated with a very high level of transparency, and finally intelligence making the system agile and adaptable.

Of course this raises the question about managing the information, knowledge and legal rights, but all of those are managed in big corporations today! Management schools are graduating students with these special skills by the thousands every year. By making global business models go local we have in a way invented the “factory in a box” without ever having to build the thing (the factory in a box is the dream of SF writers who visions small manufacturing plants that can produce anything)

Our model has actually outsmarted that concept. By connecting all production and by using all that wasted capacity a true lean model is achieved, not only for the individual company but for the system as a whole.