It’s tough to teach leadership skills, but it’s easier to teach people how to become more comfortable making decisions with limited information. That’s what the HBS Case Method is about. Take a bunch of tomorrow’s leaders who forked over six figures for a network that ultimately won’t live up to their expectations and serve them a business scenario. Have them visualize what the outcome might be, then compare that to what actually transpired. Someday, distributed manufacturing will probably be a case study.
The Distributed Manufacturing Story
Distributed manufacturing is about disrupting the disparate domain of machine shops scattered across the globe with AI-powered software for estimating jobs in real-time along with new manufacturing technologies like metal 3D printing. The idea has been described by any number of names including:
- Manufacturing On Demand
- On-Demand Manufacturing
- Manufacturing-as-a-Service
- Digital Manufacturing
- Cloud Manufacturing
- Contract Manufacturing
- Etc, etc, etc.
Global manufacturing is a trillion-dollar industry, so capturing one percent of that opportunity is a $10 billion run rate. That’s the idea, but what transpired hasn’t matched the lofty expectations. Among the many distributed manufacturing players, two dominant business models have emerged – doing the manufacturing in-house or farming it out to others.
In-House Distributed Manufacturing
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