Project-Based Delivery vs. Productization

Custom-building a solution for each customer versus turning it into a standard product sold at scale.

Project-based delivery means designing a custom solution for each customer's specific scenario, sending engineers on-site to commission and deliver it, with revenue settled project by project; productization means turning a capability into a standard hardware and software product that a customer can buy and get running with only light configuration, allowing it to be replicated at scale. Project-based work ramps up quickly and individual deals can be large, but it's labor-intensive, hard to scale, and margins are limited; productization requires heavy upfront investment but has low marginal cost. Non-standard automation and system integration in industrial automation mostly fall into the project-based category. What embodied-AI companies are chasing with general-purpose robots is, at heart, using generalization to turn project-based work into a product.

ExampleCustom-designing fixtures and vision software for one production line and spending three months on-site commissioning it is project-based work; a robot that, once unboxed, can do many kinds of tasks from natural-language instructions is a productized one.

Related

Non-Standard (Custom) Automation · System Integrator · General-purpose Robot · Scaled Deployment · Closed Commercial Loop · Engineering / Productionization

Sources

Productization - Wikipedia