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Point of View November—December 2013| 13 the various participants are well established. Designers translate customer needs into viable products. Producers own facilities that emphasize efficiency and low-cost production. In the past four decades, these producers have increasingly relied on a distributed and extended supply chain, sourcing the lowest-cost providers to build components and subassemblies on a global scale. The production methods employed by these manufacturers have relied heavily on subtractive manufacturing methods, which begin with a solid physical form that is ground, cut, drilled, milled, lathed, and otherwise has material removed from it to make the shapes needed to build components, subassemblies, and ultimately complete products. In this production model, reducing variation to enable repetitive production of interchangeable parts provides a competitive advantage. In the 1990s …