7.0 - Industrial Production

The Seed Factory approach can also be used for conventional commercial factory production. The rationale is that building a starter set is cheaper than building a whole factory at once, and the integrated automation and processing flow does not need much human labor and uses cheap raw materials. Therefore the economics should be attractive.

In comparison to the Personal Factory example, an Industrial Factory has the following differences and relationships:

• It would follow the same design principles and general architecture, so far as features like automation and self-expansion.
• It assumes larger scale dedicated outputs, thus the range of products is more limited.
• The output not used for self-growth is mostly sold to customers rather than used by the owners.
• Once the factory is built up, the starter set may be taken elsewhere to repeat the process. It would then function as construction equipment rather than a permanent part of the end factory.
• The growth may have earlier phases with mostly growth and not much end output, and later transitions to less growth and more end products. The larger scale and reduced early sales implies more starting capital to reach full production.
• More emphasis in prototypes would be on scaling to larger sizes, and evolving to dedicated machines with higher efficiency, rather than flexible multipurpose machines.
• Because of larger scale and production volume, higher levels of automation are more valuable.