The Revolution In A Box

Next time you have to wait six weeks for the kitchen door or lawn furniture you ordered, think of Gene Kirila. He would have you order your custom whatever at a store register, then direct you to drive around back, where--Presto! Out it would pop from a portable minifactory.

Kirila has devised a system that will make almost any product, anywhere, anytime. Well, at least anything that can be molded--which is just about everything we touch these days. Kirila's Virtual Engineered Composites (VEC) process is a factory in a box. The box can be as small as a mop basin or as big (so far) as a 40-ft. freight container. Plopped down in the middle of Azerbaijan or Arizona or Angola, it could start pushing out toilet seats one day and pipeline sections the next.

VEC's big secret: a digitally controlled chemical molding system that can be operated on site or, via the Internet, from thousands of miles away. Says the peripatetic entrepreneur: "It's like a 3-D fax machine."

The VEC process is to manufacturing what dos was to the personal-computer business in its early days. If it proves itself, it will lead the way toward an entirely new system of manufacture in which we can make things digitally. "If operating systems could run computers, they should be able to run a factory," Kirila says. "My big question was this: How do you leverage everything that is happening in the information age and use it to build tangible products?"

Another big question: How does the box work?

Say you want to introduce the Jacuzzi to newly affluent Chinese peasants. Instead of shipping the tubs from California, you simply ship the VEC unit, or cell. To make the tubs, two composite skins are draped over a foam model, and a thermochemical reaction causes them to harden into shape. (Because no metal bending is involved and the "thermoset" process uses chemistry, not immense heat, the molds cost a fraction of the conventional version.) The skins are then attached to a universal frame. The cell is closed and filled with pressurized water, which braces the skins together. Then composite materials are injected into the mold and catalyzed, causing the materials to harden. Unlike injection molding, a common manufacturing process, VEC's "floating mold" uses an operating system that constantly adjusts the water pressure and chemical balance. It sounds simple. But when you consider that there are up to 800 variables in the process--and thus 800 things that can go wrong--the complexity is astounding.

Since the entire unit is virtually self-contained, it can be assembled and running anywhere in a matter of days. If the market in baths dries up, you can switch the mold skins to make another product within an hour. Labor? O.K., you have to add hardware or electrical wiring to the finished product. But the VEC cell requires three people and very little technical expertise--as long as there is a link to the mother node.

The man who started this revolution is a beefy football jock who dropped out of college because he didn't think he was learning enough. Kirila grew up working the family farm in the shadow of the struggling steel mills of Pennsylvania's Shenango Valley, 60 miles north of Pittsburgh. He was as fascinated by manufacturing as some teenagers are by cars. In high school he was devising weight machines for his football teammates. An injury sidelined him in 1984, and he dropped out of Youngstown State University to get into the fitness-machine business. With a $500 deposit from a customer, he and a friend started Pyramid Fitness Machines in a barn. By 1993 it was a $44 million company.

Kirila, 35, is the kind of guy who sleeps only because he's dog tired, and then he's likely to bolt out of bed and down to the office with a new idea about moving molecules. On business trips to Tokyo (Japanese firms were his biggest customers), he would get his distributor to arrange access for him to factories. He spent two nights prowling the catwalks above a Nissan Maxima assembly line, studying every human and robotic move below. Obsessed? He dragged his wife on a factory tour of China and Japan during their honeymoon.

In 1993, Kirila sold his company to fitness giant Cybex and started Pyramid Operating Systems. That's when he and his engineering chief, Bob McCollum, devised a software program to control each step in the manufacturing process. A company offered them a lucrative contract to build storm drains, but Pyramid didn't have the $2 million needed to fashion or tool the proper steel mold to shape the pipe. That's when McCollum came up with a startlingly simple--and cheap--idea. Instead of a metal mold, why not fashion two pieces of composite in the shape of the product, inject the resin into the cell and brace the flimsy mold with pressurized water?

It took months of hair-pulling setbacks, but they figured out how to digitally control the chemicals, water pressure and the mold itself, and began fabricating larger and larger products, from pipe to custom boat hulls. The average cost to tool a mold: a mere $25,000, nearly a 99% cost reduction. "Once we had the floating mold," says McCollum, recalling their excitement, "we wanted a whole factory in a box."