On-Demand Man­u­fac­tur­ing to the res­cue! Almost 500 man­u­fac­tures have recent­ly signed up as a pur­chas­er or ven­dor of machine time. What does this mean? It means that thanks to a com­pa­ny a lit­tle more than half a year old, com­pa­nies in need of man­u­fac­tur­ing (com­put­er-pro­grammed machin­ery) ser­vices can be aligned with com­pa­nies that have idle machines ready to be used. The com­pa­ny is called Make­Time Inc. Buy­ers and sell­ers on Make­Time upload project spec­i­fi­ca­tions that would need CNC machines—typically lath­es, drills, laser-jet and oth­er machines used to forge prod­ucts out of met­al, wood or oth­er materials—via com­put­er pro­grams designed to meet exact man­u­fac­tur­ing specs.

An exam­ple would be, if you need­ed 1000 indus­tri­al com­po­nents you cre­at­ed in CAD/CAM (jobs for CAD/CAM) and want­ed them at the end of the month; post it on MakeTime.io and receive price bids from mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies with avail­able machines. When you pick some­one you like and a price is agreed upon for the project, you’ll pay Make­Time. When this hap­pens they’ll pay the man­u­fac­tur­er half upfront and then the remain­ing minus MakeTime’s %15 per­cent cut once you approve the job was com­plet­ed to your sat­is­fac­tion. Make­Time has a vet­ting sys­tem in place for deter­min­ing the rep and qual­i­ty of a ven­dor, but if things go awry and they will from time to time, Make­Time will refer the buy­er to a new mar­ket­place sell­er with­out charg­ing more than the orig­i­nal job price.

MakeTime’s total fund­ing so far is $3.87 mil­lion, Dru­ra Par­rish, CEO (Jobs for CEO) and founder of Make­Time, says his com­pa­ny will use the funds to expand prod­uct devel­op­ment and sales and mar­ket­ing oper­a­tions. “Make­Time is the solu­tion where the focus is on-demand and just-in-time cou­pled with flex­i­bil­i­ty,” he says. “Man­u­fac­tur­ers now have the pow­er to expand both their capac­i­ty and capa­bil­i­ties with no cap­i­tal expen­di­ture and less risk while help­ing machine shop own­ers mon­e­tize idle time.” Par­rish says that in the future they want to imple­ment a sched­ul­ing sys­tem to man­age avail­able machines and which are cur­rent­ly open. A rat­ing sys­tem for the ven­dors is also being developed.

In this day and age, where time­li­ness is king, hav­ing alter­na­tives to a pro­duc­tion choke hold is major news. Let’s not for­get that the com­pa­ny has some mon­ey for get­ting qual­i­ty per­son­nel to help with all this inno­va­tion, you might just want to get your­self in front of them for employ­ment. This sounds like a com­pa­ny with a good idea and a pos­si­ble long term future.