How Automedi's circular economic clusters help envision near infinite scale global manufacturing with under 10% of current emissions
One of the common questions we are asked is how Automedi scales. Before we can explain that we have to explain how scaling conventional manufacturing works in industries like retail, health and social care,
Many of the constraints of scale are outside the control of almost every manufacturer and marketer in any country. In the UK, they are constrained by the number of British ports, the space on cargo ships or in warehouses and the availability of lorries, trains and vans.
In conventional “supply-side manufacture” items are made somewhere else and transported to their destination. This employs many moving parts that can go wrong. Even blocking reasonable transit. Most purchase-to-fulfilment cycles take several weeks or even months to fulfil.
For emergencies, governments keep a stockpile of essential items in accessible warehouses around each country. Topping up those supplies when demand is lean, to keep it ready for action.
However, the introduces several other problems. Most notably seen recently seen, medical items like PPE and medicines like insulin can expire. Leaving the service without any viable equipment, resulting operational and financial waste over-and-above the costs of the original safety net and costs of storage and transportation for goods that ultimately may never get used and accumulating carbon dioxide in the meantime.
“Demand-side manufacturing” is different. By making products where they are needed and not where suppliers are able to place factories, it cuts out many of the moving parts in a supply chain, including the pinch points at customs. Not only that but deploying it with a circular economy can optimise costs and economic value in real-time and even recycle the wasted PPE at source into other items health service needn't then buy in future.
Unlike conventional manufacturing, the other thing demand-side manufacturing can do is “horizontally scale”. Horizontal scaling simply means repeatedly duplicating your [usually small] manufacturing. Unlike “vertical scaling”, which requires expensive additions to making one factory bigger or faster. Automedi's horizontal scaling doesn't need expensive upgrades.
This video, from our CEO, explains the difference and shows how thousands of Automedi’s demand-side circular plastics economies can make the same volume of equipment as conventional factories, where needed, in minutes instead of weeks or months by running Quartic jobs in parallel.
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