The world of manufacturing is riddled with software that tries to do a little bit of everything. Software that, in the attempt to satisfy every individual customer desire, fails to truly do anything remarkably well. This is particularly true for the part of the manufacturing value chain that sits between product design and start of production. Too many software companies, judging by their revenue composition, have more in common with IT-consulting organizations than they have with modern enterprise software companies. It is hard to argue that your offering is scalable if it demands custom development for successful deployment with each new customer.

The inherent complexity of going from design to shop floor in the current precision manufacturing paradigm is partly to blame for the state of current software. Manufacturers are, at face value, sufficiently different to one another that it’s easy to sell yourself on the story that customization is a necessary evil to win new logos.

But, custom development is a tax on your entire organization. Engineering resources become spread thin and less focused. Corner cases increasingly make up your codebase, making it harder and more expensive to maintain and renew. Onboarding and support functions will struggle to create standardized processes, while sales is given a free pass on making whatever concessions necessary to close the deal. Left unchecked, the offering, as well as the brand, are at risk of being commoditized by the company’s own doing. Who will the market know you as if your product doesn’t excel in any one mission critical use case?

At Encube, we spend a considerable amount of time obsessing over how to achieve true software product scale in this space, and avoid the services trap many manufacturing software outfits find themselves in. Regardless of where we start our reasoning, we always come to the conclusion that product and industry verticalization is key to our ability to achieve software scale. Industrialization of precision CNC machined components, to be specific. For three key reasons.

1. We are a deep tech software startup. The technology we develop is built on top of an entirely new paradigm compared to existing solutions for the market we’re targeting. But, we target an existing market. This means that our value add must be 10x better than anything else out there to win the hearts and minds of users and customers. It is not sufficient to just be twice as good, because it won’t move the needle sufficiently for a customer to bet on an unknown startup.

2. Manufacturing customers demand replicability, both for quality assurance reasons as well as regulatory. This means that the AI systems we develop, and the process automation these target, must satisfy high accuracy requirements, ensure fully transparent decision chains, and leave users feeling in control of the end to end process. All the while being capable of generalizing to designs they haven’t come across before. The most efficient way to limit this risk is to be laser focused on a single manufacturing vertical that is large enough to offer room to adjust our go to market as we pursue growth. Precision CNC machining is one of the largest industrial verticals in the world.

3. Existing offerings that target product industrialization are use case horizontal, and top-to-bottom focused in their approach to securing cost effective design and manufacturing. They are horizontal, because they offer support for 80-100+ production processes, out of the box, customers can choose from to evaluate product designs. And they are top-to-bottom in the sense that they use general benchmarks to estimate time and cost of production, not the underlying process in use.

The horizontal, top-to-bottom approach makes industrialization statistically feasible on average, but produces unacceptable degrees of variance for any one individual product or part design, which diminishes the usefulness of embedding industrialization within the feedback loop of product development. Replicating this approach across dozens, or even hundreds, of manufacturing processes only serves to enlarge the risk of error.

At Encube, we believe that going deep into a single vertical – so we can understand the underlying production process at its core – is the only viable path to successfully bring industrialization into the product development loop at scale. And, in doing so, radically lower the barriers to entry and accelerate productivity growth for the next generation of hardware makers.