Pós-Magnitogorsk

Nada de novo no texto que se segue. Escreve-se sobre isto aqui no blogue há vários anos. O que é novidade é encontrar isto escrito num jornal português:

"No essencial esta nova fábrica, apropriadamente intitulada "NextFab", consiste num conjunto de máquinas, várias de base digital mas outras não, com as quais é possível fabricar praticamente tudo. Tem similaridades com os chamados FabLabs, uma invenção do MIT, mas com uma variante importante. A componente digital, crítica nos FabLabs, não é aqui determinante.
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Na indústria convencional (Moi ici: Produção em massa, modelo do século XX) as máquinas são concebidas para cumprirem uma única e repetitiva função. Cada nova produção exige normalmente uma reconfiguração importante da maquinaria e dos processos. Ao invés, neste novo tipo de fábrica pode fazer-se em simultâneo uma bicicleta, um saca-rolhas, uma camisola ou desenvolver um novo polímero. As máquinas são muito versáteis e de elevada capacidade combinatória. (Moi ici: Produção customizada em Mongo, peças únicas, pequenas séries, produção para uso próprio)
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A nova fábrica é acessível a qualquer pessoa, quer na modalidade de auto-produção, em que o próprio opera os equipamentos, ou contratando pontualmente um serviço de assistência. (Moi ici: Prosumers, os artesãos de Mongo - todos nós) O modelo de negócio segue estas ideias e é por isso bastante original. Assenta numa carteira de associados que, através do pagamento de uma cota incomparavelmente menor do que o investimento em causa, utilizam livremente e sem mais custos todos os equipamentos. Estes são portanto partilhados e utilizados de forma bastante mais eficaz e produtiva do que é habitual. A propriedade exclusiva não é económica nem muito inteligente. Uma máquina, um qualquer equipamento ou, por exemplo, o nosso carro estão na maior parte do tempo parados. Não faz qualquer sentido. A partilha é muito mais lógica e eficaz. (Moi ici: Os modelos de negócio assentes na partilha e no aluguer)
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O gosto muda velozmente, a inovação constante altera comportamentos e necessidades, os problemas sociais, ambientais e económicos crescem em complexidade. Faz cada vez menos sentido continuar a produzir em massa, quando as pessoas desejam diferenciação. Faz cada vez menos sentido impor uma determinada solução quando as pessoas gostariam de poder escolher, desenhar, conceber a sua.
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Existem para além disso problemas concretos que exigem uma mudança. A produção em massa gera imensos desperdícios, precisa de enormes áreas de armazenagem, requer uma sofisticada e onerosa rede de transportes. É, além do mais, ambientalmente insustentável. Por isso as fábricas do futuro terão forçosamente de ser muito diferentes.
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A indústria do futuro será ligeira, dispersa, diversificada e sobretudo acessível. Os equipamentos pesados, as grandes linhas de montagem irão dando lugar a pequenos centros de produção que funcionarão ao virar da esquina. Os poluentes e inacessíveis complexos industriais tenderão a desaparecer. Assistiremos a uma espécie de regresso da pequena oficina de bairro, só que altamente sofisticada e, mais importante, à disposição de todos. Isto vai mudar muito o universo produtivo e é melhor estarmos todos preparados. Depois não digam que não avisei."

Agora imaginem  o mundo de possibilidades que se abre...
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´As Magnitogorsk do século XX absorveram as pessoas expulsas da agricultura. Agora, com o fim dessas Magnitogorsk voltaremos ao mundo não normalizado, ao mundo diversificado, ao mundo da produção dispersa e próxima do consumo. voltaremos a um mundo com menos empregados por conta de outrém. Small is beautiful!
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Trecho retirado de "Nova indústria".

Diferenciar, diferenciar, diferenciar

"Know who your customer is and build your business around that customer. Ninety-eight percent of small businesses fail because the owners treat the business as a love. What you really have to know is what your customer loves. You have to know what problems your customers are having in their lives, and you have to build solutions. For us, 75 percent of our customers are female, 25 to 50 years old, college educated, brand conscious and brand loyal. They don't care about technology other than how it makes life easier and faster.
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[After getting to know your customer, then] you have to differentiate, differentiate, differentiate. We all compete with Amazon and Walmart; you really have to think about how you're offering something different and better."

Trecho retirado de Custom Nation (declaração do CEO da Shutterfly).

Do you have a business idea?

"Do you have a business idea?
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Well, in the new world of customization, you can stop daydreaming and do it. Back in the 20th century, launching a new business was an expensive, risky undertaking. You had to have up-front financing to pay for production, a costly brick-and-mortar storefront (or, at least, shelf space in one) and a highly paid staff. Now all it takes to set up shop is a great product or service and a website.
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Whatever your basic idea for a business, making it customized is the easiest and best way to run it from general concept into viable, profitable reality. When you sell a made-to-order product, you get paid before you make anything, so your monetary risk can be close to nothing. Plus, with customers contributing, their own ideas and excitement for free, your design-related labor costs and marketing expenses will be much lower than in traditional mass-production businesses." 

Muitas vezes dou comigo a pensar que o século XX foi uma espécie de bolha que está finalmente a vazar. Então, para procurar pistas sobre o futuro, tento encontrar paralelismos no passado.
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No passado pré industrial, a geografia era poderosa.
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A geografia impedia a homogeneização, os trajes regionais, a gastronomia regional, os sotaques regionais são disso uma prova.
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Hoje, a geografia deixou de ter esse poder. A democratização da produção não vai ser conduzida pela distância mas pelo gosto, pelas tribos.
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Trecho retirado de "Custom Nation"

Democratizar a inovação

"3-D printers  will be mainstream in the next decade and that they'll completely revolutionize the way we live. The possibilicies are limitless." he said. -We can't even know how exactly they will change our lives yet. It would be like asking someone in the 1970s to guess how the internet would change our lives. It's going to change absolutely everything.
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Best of all, with3-D printers, anytime that anyone comes up with a great object that solves an existing problem, the inventor will be able to disseminate the new invention with unbelievable speed.
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And the factory of the future won't be the mass-production plant in the developing world; it will much more likely be your tech-savvy neighbor's garage ... or anywhere you can rent the use of a 3-D printer. In the same way that the invention of the printing press in the middle of the last millennium democratized knowledge by making it possible for people outside of the elite to get books, 3-D printers promise to democratize innovation for this millennium. It will no longer simply be the connected, corporate-funded elite who will be able to create inventions and designs that reach the masses. In the 21st century, everyone will have the tools necessary to create and spread their creations. Small audiences, even as small as one, will have a voice to ask for a custom product to meet their needs, and individuals will have the power to answer." 

Trechos retirados de "Custom Nation"

Quantos?

"MIT's Smart Customization Group, estimates that within the next decade as much as 15 percent of the clothing Americans buy will be customized, and that as much as 5 percent of the manufactured food and drink items they buy will be customized. These statistics might seem small percentage-wise. But in absolute numbers, they're enormous. Americans spend roughly $250 billion a year on clothing and roughly $1 trillion a year on manufactured (processed and/or pre-made) food and drinks. This means that by 2020 the annual market for customized clothing will be worth an estimated $37.5 billion and that the annual market for customized food and drinks will be worth an estimated $50 billion.
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As consumers come to expect greater levels of customization in everything they purchase, companies are increasingly seeing geographic proximity to their consumers as a serious competitive advantage. This is especially true as wages are rising rapidly in many of the countries America uses for outsourcing. (For example, pay for factory workers in China climbed by 69 percent between 2005 and 2010.) Companies that are closer to their customers can instantly respond to changes in demand and deliver customized goods without incurring sky-high shipping costs."

Fazendo o paralelo para o mercado europeu, mais sofisticado, talvez os números sejam ainda mais interessantes, afinal foi aqui que nasceu o modelo Zara e, afinal foi lá que nasceu o modelo Gap, é muito por aqui que vejo um futuro para as nossas PMEs.
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Alguns empresários à frente de PMEs até estão a avançar para tornar as suas linhas de produção mais rápidas e flexíveis, para aproveitar a proximidade geográfica. Contudo, ou falham ou arriscam demasiado, ou preparam-se para, inevitavelmente, deixar muito dinheiro em cima da mesa, quando continuam a olhar para dentro da sua empresa, para as suas máquinas e pessoas, para a sua querida Produção.
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O fundamental é o contacto, a relação, com os clientes-finais.
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Quantos empresários industriais estão a trabalhar para aproveitar a internet como prateleira? Quantos se estão a associar a lojas online? Quantos estão a criar a sua própria loja online? Quantos estão a criar unidades independentes para explorar a vertente comercial?
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Quantos abdicam do contacto com os clientes-finais, para apostar no desenvolvimento de sistemas de trabalho com os lojistas online para criar laços especiais ganhar-ganhar, que minimizem o rolo compressor na negociação?
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Quantos pensam num modelo de negócio diferente?
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Trechos retirados de "Custom Nation".

Quando a mudança é descontínua... não há tradição que salve os incumbentes

Pelo vistos, um dos artigos de 2012 da The Economist mais vistos na internet foi "The last Kodak moment?". Vale a pena ler para perceber como um Golias complacente, confiante na longa sucessão de vitórias, pode cair.
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Entretanto, em "Custom Nation" descubro a Shutterfly:

"When Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark started Shutterfly in December 1999, his idea was to give American consumers the ability to print photographs from their digital cameras. Back then only a tiny number of Americans had digital cameras. With a simple two-megapixel camera costing as much as $800, its not hard to see why. But Jim was convinced that the world would switch to digital: in retrospect, his prediction couldn't have been more prescient.
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Around 2004, when it became clear to everyone (and not just Jim) that Americans were, in fact, swapping film for digital, hundreds of companies rushed into the digital photo printing space.
At the time, Shutterfly was far from a household name. The company had just $50 million in annual revenue in 2004 and was barely turning a profit. Meanwhile, Kodak—the age-old king of American photography—had, by 2005, surged to the No. 1 spot in U.S. digital camera sales and was pulling in $5.7 billion annually. Back then, if you had to bet on which company would be filing for bankruptcy protection in 2012, the smart bet would have been Shutterfly by a mile. But, of course, history tells a different story.
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Although Kodak had embraced digital cameras, the company failed to see what people would want to use them for. Kodak kept thinking consumers would still want standard 4 x 6 photographs. In 2005 Shutterfly hired eBay's customer acquisition guru. Jeffrey Housenbold, to take over as its new CEO. Jeff had a different idea, which he told me when I spoke to him in the spring of 2012:
When I walked in [as CEO of Shutterfly], we were largely undifferentiated from the competition. It was all about 4 x 6 prints and price. We were not helping people do more with their images and memories. We were much more along the old paradigm, which was: Drop off a roll of film, develop prints and place them in clear sleeves for users to put in a binder on a bookshelf. I brought a different perspective and said, "My wife and I use Shutterfly to stay connected in this dual-income, geographically fragmented, time-compressed society where we have friends and family all over the world." I thought of it as a social connection and a way to share life's memories with friends and family.
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Shutterfly dropped the "photo printers" tagline and started calling itself an "Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service." And while Kodak remained focused on the old 4 x 6 photo for the bookshelf binder, Shutterfly turned its eye to more customized and lucrative products like custom calendars, custom greeting cards, custom photo books, custom mugs and custom mouse pads. The company also started putting an enormous value on gaining the trust and loyalty of their customers. Unlike many of its competitors, Shutterfly never deleted a single photo its users uploaded, regardless of whether that customer bought anything. As Jeff said, We have always had this customer-centric approach, where it is not about photos and it is not about this month's revenue. It is about a lifelong relationship."
Jeff's vision paid off. In January 2011 Shutterfly became one of the world's first true customizers to break the $1 billion mark for a public company valuation. Soon after, in January 2012, the less customizing Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection: two months later, the once-iconic photo company sold its online arm, the Kodak Gallery (complete with 75 million users), to Shutterfly for $23.8 million."

Ainda ontem, num jantar de Natal alguém comentava exemplos do mercado em que actuava, uns afundam-se e outros crescem e crescem e crescem. Voltando ao modelo de Ian McCarthy:

Bastou à Shutterfly estar atenta e trabalhar duas vertentes, a mudança descontínua na "Procura" e nos "Produtos"...
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Quando a mudança é descontínua... não há tradição que salve os incumbentes.

"Custom Nation" e Mongo

"As we, get deeper into the 2010s, the most successful companies in every industry in the United States - from food to fashion - are ditching mass production in favor of customization. This shift is so enormous and all-encompassing that it ultimately promises to define the coming decades as powerfully as the Industrial Revolution defined the 19th and 20th centuries. It is 2012, and we are at the beginning of the 21st century's Custom Revolution.
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America is becoming a nation of customizers. And the one new rule for successful businesses across the country is simple: Customize for your clients. ... Customization is completely changing the way we do business,
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In the 20th century, conventional wisdom was that customization was a bad business model for anything, except a small niche seller because it was expensive and slow. But that was so last century. Today, forget everything you thought you knew about customizing.
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Companies with completely custom business models are popping up everywhere and breaking \that used to be thought of as a glass ceiling for customizers: the billion-dollar mark.
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For would-be entrepreneurs, the custom business model is the new gold rush.
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"Customization isn't just a trend," I said. "It's the new way Americans are going to do business. It's the new mass production. By the year 2040, everything we consume - food, clothing, cars, advertisements, trips abroad - will be customized to meet our exact desires. Everything. I'm willing to put money on it." 

Esta "Custom Nation" não é mais do que uma designação alternativa para o que apelido aqui de Mongo.
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TRechos retirados do 1º capítulo de "Custom Nation: Why Customization Is the Future of Business and How to Profit From" de Anthony Flynn e Emily Flynn Vencat.