What’s Up At MakerBot? (and that 7 week lead time!?!)
When you order your MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, it says 7 week lead time. That means that it’s our goal to ship it out within 7 weeks. Because there are more than 200 different types of parts from a massive amount of suppliers, operations at MakerBot are challenging and the operations team here at MakerBot works hard to get things here on time and sometimes our suppliers meet their delivery dates and a lot of times they don’t. We’ve had issues where we order something and the first batch is perfect and the second batch is junk that we have to send back and start over with another supplier. Also, sometimes we go back to order more of something and find that there aren’t anymore and we have to get them manufactured from scratch. This isn’t a new phenomena, we’ve been dealing with this from the beginning. At about the 800th bot, we ran out of stepper motors that had shafts that would fit the pulleys we had on the cupcake and because we had thousands of pulleys already, we had to get those motors made custom from scratch. This coincided the new year and we had a backup of something like 12 weeks at one point. Ugh. We emailed everyone who had ordered a bot to let them know, but it sucked for us and for Operators waiting for their bots. Nobody likes to order something and wait.
MakerBot is 25 people now but demand continues to grow. The thing is, we keep getting orders and we’re still working to scale up to meet demand. A year ago we were 5 people and everyone was doing everything including packing boxes. Just because we have more people now hasn’t slowed the pace. We’re still pushing the limit of the minimal amount of sleep to get so we can work hard to get MakerBots into the hands of creative people around the world.
One of the things that’s changed since we’ve started scaling up is timing. It takes us more time to put things into production. We were able to prototype the Cupcake in two months (and 2 cases of ramen and countless bottles of caffeinated club mate) and bring the first batch into production in one more month after that because we were only pulling together 20 kits. Now we have a much more challenging math problem allocating resources and trying to make predictions on how much of something we should buy and how much we think we’ll sell. It’s tricky. When we launched the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter, we ordered parts for 250 of them. I love this kit, it’s a great way to turn your MakerBot into a sweet plotter, but it’s sold much slower than anticipated, partly because within hours of launch in the store and the sharing of the source files, there was a printable clone available. In retrospect, being obsessed with open source and having awesome operators, we should have planned for that! We’re getting better at making predictions, but things like getting slashdotted can change our gameplans at the drop of a hat!
I’ve seen a bunch of sadfaces on the internet about the cupcake being out of stock and that there are only 250 of them left. We’ll have these back up in the store in spring when we get some parts that are taking forever to get made. I’m proud of the cupcake, we launched the cupcake and later added a heated build platform and then an automated build platform and then we added the MK4 and then the MK5 and all these things pulled more power which started burning out the mosfets and we switched over to including a relay board with the kit. We modified the cupcake as much as we could and have done as much as we can to create an upgrade path for folks. User improvements like the z-rider mean that folks may be able to continually upgrade their cupcake, but for us, we’ve been really happy to move on to the Thing-O-Matic with MakerBot Generation 4 electronics and a cantilevered z-stage. When those last 250 cupcakes go up for sale in the spring, I’ll be happy that folks can get a great 3D printer for cheap for a limited time.
What’s coming up that’s got me excited? I’m super psyched for the next release of ReplicatorG and our front room is transforming into the MakerBot Botfarm™ with all the MakerBots we built for CES back in Brooklyn getting set up to print things out all day! More about that when it’s all set up!
I walked around and took some snapshots after writing this and put up a slide show so you can see a little window into our life at the MakerBot Botcave.
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17 Comments so far
Twotimes
I completely understand what you guys are going through. I just specified a device that’ll take at least 16 weeks until they are in the USA and that doesn’t include customs which can be a crap shoot.
Thaed
I wish you only great success! Makerbot makes cool stuff and I’m interested in anything you come up with.
Too bad you don’t make a Makerbot Mendel. I want more platform space!
tmophoto
great update. so glad makerbot is growing like it is and its awesome to hear about what you are doing, how you are improving. hop eyou can do updates like this a few times a year.
i would love to see some of the kits you offer in a form where it includes all things but laser cut parts (like the unicorn) i would much rather spend the money with makerbot than some random RC company for the servo etc.
What up at the BotCave? - machine quotidienne
[...] co-founder and former MAKE contributor Bre Pettis wrote a long post on MakerBot.com about what goes on at the BotCave: When you order your MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, it says 7 week lead time. That means that it’s [...]
My Blog - What up at the BotCave?
[...] and former CONSTITUTE contributor Bre Pettis wrote a extended advertise on MakerBot.com about what goes on at the BotCave: When you order your MakerBot Body-O-Matic, it says 7 week lead age. That method that it’s [...]
colorbroken
I love you guys
Keep it up!
David Robertus
I hope that you are able to stabilize your supply chain- the key to long term quality and price stability will depend upon it. Are you using a JIT delivery mechanism or warehousing in bulk?
My Blog » What up at the BotCave?
[...] co-founder and former MAKE contributor Bre Pettis wrote a long post on MakerBot.com about what goes on at the BotCave: When you order your MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, it says 7 week lead time. That means that it’s [...]
SparkySD
Well done at CES ! I saw the Thing-O-Matic at the booth and was blown away.
I’m really looking forward to building and using my TOM. Hopefully 7 weeks is a firm delivery date. I always multiply my time estimates by Pi and this works great ! Better to underpromise and overdeliver than the opposite
Out of interest – How many Thing-O-Matics have been ordered and shipped so far ?
Good Luck to everyone at MakerBot.
cyrozap
About the Unicorn:
Problems – It didn’t sell because there wasn’t much use for a pen plotter. Anybody with $20 and a computer can get and use a cheap printer that can do all that the Unicorn does (in terms of making pictures on paper) and on a much larger scale. You also have to realize that the Unicorn is VERY expensive for what it is. I know that it has custom lasercut parts, but it is just a servo and a pen mount. It doesn’t even come with a controller board! I know you’re trying to make ends meet, but it’s a bit ridiculous.
Solutions – If it was advertised that you could use the Unicorn as a way of easily making circuit boards and if you made a simple guide for doing that, the Unicorn would become a lot more popular for those of us wanting to etch circuits but don’t want to do toner-transfer. It would also be a good idea to include a controller board (might I suggest my Minimalist Unicorn Controller) so I (and others) don’t have to mess with our current side-mounted configurations. The minimalist controller will probably be much less expensive due to its lower parts count and size.
@Bre
I suggest you put a poll on the blog that essentially asks why people don’t want a Unicorn (the plotter, of course). I’d put it on my blog, but the last survey I put there was only responded to by 7 people (out of my 170 regular readers).
What I’m guessing is that a lot of them will respond with reasons similar to the ones I have here.
Email me if you need to discuss anything with me.
makeme
I feel ya. Missteps (yours and others) are par for the course. But you guys seem to be doing better than the average startup. Might I suggest focusing your products on practicality rather than aesthetics?
Basically, I wander through Thingiverse every couple days, and I’m active on the various boards, and what I see is an awful lot of people asking how they can improve print quality, or showing of the new upgrade they designed…I don’t see many people talking about making pretty things. The pen plotter (as far as I can tell) is aimed at people who want to make pretty things (so is the egg plotter for what it’s worth). As Cyrozap pointed out, if the pen plotter was marketed as a way to speed up custom PCBs (a practical tool) it might be more popular. Maybe if it came bundled with a set of pens with useful inks (like conductive
) or something like that.
My read on the situation is that before you guys put time and effort into a new product you should find out what your current customers would buy up as fast as they bought up Cupcakes and TOMs. We’re all interested in tools so we can build things…not so much a way to draw on eggs.
http://printthat.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/is-makerbot-going-to-make-it/
http://groups.google.com/group/makerbot/browse_thread/thread/2f6de123dd7a16e6/ff1cf0aa87c20792?lnk=gst&q=%22makeme%22#
Coolaba
I agree with cyrozap, it’s not really that the Makerbot kit was bad-just that a the printable version was so much better. The one piece version http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:3876 is just amazing and prints well. I’ll say this might be the best quality large object I’ve printed to date.
Makerbot could easily sell a slide parts kit in the store and I’m sure people would buy it, but that never happened. Just carry a servo, mini controller (nice for the T-O-M), and the slide and sell as a kit.
Also, very nice update on the Botcave-props to everyone on the team for the hard work and great products you producing. Looking forward to seeing the new products up in the store-nudge, nudge.
dklon
Have you looked at the Toyota Production System as something that might help with the manufacturing issues? The Just-In-Time method helped make them extremely efficient and produce higher-quality vehicles.
Wikipedia has a nice write-up on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way
Coolaba
So they just beat the 4 week mark on my T-O-M ordered the last week of December and showing up on Thursday. YMMV-as Bre has said. It’s like 4 weeks to the day showing up at my doorstep. Thanks Makerbot team!!!!
tre3
And so officially ends the path of the cupcake.
I’m curious what MBI will do with the last one :p I mean, it’s what made the company take off (right?) and now, the product is reaching end of production life.
Logistics of the TOM are obviously difficult enough to the try and add the complex logistics of legacy product upgrades. The TOM isn’t alone when it comes to these sorts of logistics – the only way to reduce those lead times is to float the cash and delay the launch (but not all startups can do that).
Retool, kick butt and start new product development for what’s going to launch next year
Snakesta | C i b o M a h t o . c o m
[...] snake. For some context, the gangsta model has been a pretty popular test print at the botcave, and I love the snake model because it is flexible, so I decided to put them both together into one [...]
Whit
I think it would be awsome to get weekly que updates just to see the progress.
CANT WAIT!!!!