Lego: How they do it

In my post last week on the new Lego Factory, which now only ships you the pieces you need rather than expensive bags of (too many) assorted parts, I promised I'd find out how the did it. Yesterday I spoke to Michael McNally, Lego's Brand Manager, who explained how they cracked the tricky picking and packing problem of total mass customization.

The answer: they pack the kits by hand, piece by piece. In one of Lego's Denmark factories, one packing station is now dedicated to Factory. The 520 pieces available in Factory are a number large enough to be interesting but small enough to be stored in bins that are no more than a step or two away for the packer. (The previous model used prepacked bags from the Creator series, which it could ship from a US warehouse). As it happened, Lego had recently automated some other parts of its Denmark operation so it had a few extra workers, who it was able to reassign to this job.

It's not a big job so far--only about 3,000 kits have been sold from the 75,000 uploaded--but that relatively small number and high upload-to-purchase ratio may be in part due to the high kit prices imposed by the previous inefficient parts strategy, which could easily double to price of a model. Now that Lego has been able to drop the average model price by 60% with this only-what-you-need packing process, I suspect more people will be tempted to buy what they design.

Next steps, McNally says: more pieces (including more minifigs) and making the software a bit easier to use.

Comments

[Bruce]

Chris,

this is really useful stuff on Lego. It'll make great details for teaching the business aspects of computing science - just geeky enough to be cool. Thanks!

[kenobi]

Well, if it works for Tesco.com...

http://www.contentcontent.co.uk

[bibi]

And copyrights ? Who own models made by users ?

[Paul]

I think Lego has it all wrong. There should be no such thing as "only... the pieces you need". I don't want my kids to be told how to build an amusement park, space station, zoo etc. and then provided with just the right parts for the job. They have their own imaginations, thank you. All they need is a "bag of (too many) assorted parts", and out comes something magic that you never expected. Anyhow, even if you buy a kid a custom-desiged space-ship kit, it will - or it should - be something totally different next week.
The only thing wrong with an "expensive bag of (too many) assorted parts" is the word "expensive".

[Car Movie Guy]

Thanks you for this informative post.

To me this seems like such a ridiculous concept myself. First of all lego pieces are incredible easy to lose. I understand that they are packaged by hand and I'm sure that lego has spent a tremendous amount of money to ensure that each piece is accounted for, but it goes without saying that a piece will get lost unless the parents are the ones putting the kit together. More headache at a higher price. I don't get it.

[ozgur alaz]

I think lego factory is great great tool. The most excited aspect is Gallery page. Imagine you can buy hundreds sorts of Lego toy (other designs) on Lego.