OK, so they kind of sound like they may be synonyms, however the distinction between on-demand, contract and distributed manufacturing may hold the key to successfully reindustrializing the US.

All three make stuff. What separates them is the minimum order quantity, the lead time, location, and the number of stakeholders in the buy-make transaction.

Contract manufactures like Jabil or Flex offer OEMs an alternative for a limited or seasonal production run that would be too disruptive to handle internally. They are experts in creating production lines designed to make a few thousand copies of a product in one of their near-shore facilities, before injecting the results into the OEM’s existing distribution network.

On-demand manufacturers sit at the other end of the MOQ spectrum, and are essentially artisinal prototyping shops. Give them a scan of a broken widget and they will reverse engineer it within a few days and send you a replacement part. There are IT platforms that broker these transactions, but the volumes they handle are low and they’re not sticky. Find a reliable shop to build you a one-off and you can call them directly the next time.

Alone, a single distributed manufacturer acts like an on-demand producer. But they are not alone. They are one node in a network of producers that (rather contradictorily) all share a unique characteristic : they are all the closest location to a specific demand signal coming from a buyer. Collectively they represent an on-demand mechanism for manufacturing at point-of-need and at mass-production scale.

Differently to contract manufacturers, DMs invest *once* in a set of flexible capabilities that can be repurposed on-demand to produce any compatible designs without the latency and minimum order quantities inherent to a CM.

Differently to an On-demand Manufacturer, DMs not only offer a Buyer Capability and Capacity, but also Proximity – which changes for each transaction. This means a DM can only exist as part of the network and remains reliant on the platform for orders.

Truth is, these are not hard alternatives. DiMaX can onboard both OMs and CMs onto our platform in order to kickstart the Distributed Manufacturing Revolution.

• Distributed Manufacturing