PARTNERING TO CREATE AN ECOSYSTEM
MANUFACTURING 4.0
“ THE IDEA OF THE AUTOMATED , OR SELF-DRIVING , SUPPLY CHAIN IS GOING TO BE REALLY EXCITING WHEN YOU START TO THINK ABOUT CONNECTING LATENT CAPACITY AUTOMATICALLY AND USING MACHINE LEARNING TO DISTRIBUTE WORK ”
— Mike Geyer , Head of Business Development , Fictiv
56 because it means this business model has the ability to invigorate local manufacturing economies by driving demand from customer bases that could be in other parts of the world .”
Geyer points out that , traditionally , small machine shops only have access to customers they know and don ’ t have the luxury of global sales and marketing teams . “ Fictiv gives them access to all of the leading innovators and customers around the world , many of whom are setting up operations in the UK . There ’ s actually a retail robotics company that we ’ re starting to work with that ’ s headquartered in San Francisco and recently moved to the UK ,” he says . “ We think that ’ s something that ’ s really exciting and one of the reasons we ’ re getting a lot of interest from local governments and their agencies that are responsible for recruiting new companies to come and bring our business model to countries like the UK , Japan and Germany . The key differentiator is that we ’ re not just a big traditional contract manufacturer , we ’ re actually using latent capacity .”
PARTNERING TO CREATE AN ECOSYSTEM
Geyer highlights the importance of strong investment partners , such as G2VP , who bring “ incredible value in terms of connections and new geographies , along with the ability
JANUARY 2020