BEYOND MASS PRODUCTION
Another significant change, as we shall shortly see, brings the customer more directly than ever before into the manufacturing process. In some industries we are only a step removed from a situation in which a customer-company pipes its specifications directly into the manufacturer’s computers, which will in turn control the production line. As this practice becomes widespread, the customer will become so integrated into the production process that we will find it more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and who the producer.
Finally, while Second Wave manufacture was Cartesian in the sense that products were broken into pieces, then painstakingly reassembled, Third Wave manufacture is post-Cartesian or “wholistic.” This is illustrated by what has happened to common manufactured products like the wristwatch. Whereas watches once had hundreds of moving parts, we are now able to make solid-state watches that are more accurate and reliable—with no moving parts at all. Similarly, today’s Panasonic TV set has half as many parts as the sets of ten years ago. As tiny microprocessors—those miracle chips again—turn up in more and more products, they replace impressive numbers of conventional components. Exxon introduces the “Qyx”—a new typewriter with only a handful of moving parts as against the hundreds in the IBM Selectric.Similarly, a well-known 35mm camera, the Canon AE-1, is now made with 300 fewer parts than the model it superseded. Fully 175 of these were replaced by a single Texas Instruments chip.
By intervening at the molecular level, by using computer-aided design or other advanced manufacturing tools, we integrate more and more functions into fewer and fewer parts, substituting “wholes” for many discrete components. What is occurring can be compared to the rise of photography in the visual arts. Instead of making a picture by placing innumerable daubs of paint on a canvas, the photographer “makes”the entire image at once by pressing a button. We are beginning to see this “presto effect” hi manufacturing.
The pattern becomes clear, therefore. Vast changes in the techno-sphere and the info-sphere have converged to change the way we make goods. We are moving rapidly beyond traditional mass production to a sophisticated mix of mass and de-massified products. The ultimate goal of this effort is now apparent: completely customized goods, made with wholistic, continuous-flow processes, increasingly under the direct control of the consumer.
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