Redistributed manufacturing (RdM) refers to manufacturing business models, strategies, systems and technologies that change the economicsudand organization of manufacturing, particularly related to location and scale. Small-scale manufacturing has the potential to help tailor productsudto satisfy the specific needs of consumers different in terms of geographical location, cultural roots, improve sustainability and drive the societyudtowards circular economy. While RdM has the great potential to deliver this, currently, very little has been understood on how RdM could helpudSMEs for gaining economic benefits due to the constraint of their business model, lack of understanding on customers, limited resourceudcommitment on R&D, marketing and sales, supply chain integration, etc. Similarly user-driven design and customer-insights delivered throughud‘big data’ analytics has the potentially to be highly beneficial for manufacturing SME and little is known of how they can be combined with RdMudto benefit SMEs. Hence, they may impose risks on the business and operation of SMEs should poor choices be made or systems be implementedudbadly. The economic importance of SMEs within the UK and Europe is long established with manufacturing SMEs accounting for 60% of alludprivate sector jobs in the UK. Within the European Union the overwhelming majority of companies (trading in the non-financial sectors) wereudSMEs (99.8%), employing 89.7 million people (67.1% of the workforce). This paper reports some of the results of an initial exploratory surveyudof manufacturing SMEs within the United Kingdom. Focusing on their background and status, and their current understanding and interests inudRdM, big customer analytics and related topics.
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