AirBnB for factories

Problem

In the manufacturing industry, factories often use their equipment only part of the time, even though they have initially invested substantial amounts of money in them. When unused, investments made in production equipment produce nothing, and the equipment becomes obsolete without use. Furthermore, in today’s global market it is not easy for companies that need production equipment and companies that have underused equipment to find each other.

Solution: AirBnB for factories

Combi Works has established AirFaas, a worldwide leasing service for production equipment. With the help of this cloud-based service, production plants can share their underused equipment to other companies. The request for quotations, procurement, financing and other necessary tasks are managed through the open AirFaas system. In the system, the customer can report its needs and a production equipment owner can advertise any available capacity.

The AirFaas service brings together those owning equipment and those needing it in a new way that enables co-operation and the implementation of circular economy principles. Using production equipment as efficiently as possible reduces the need to build new equipment and factories, which also diminishes the carbon footprint from manufacturing. AirFaas enables the use of underused equipment located near the customer, whereas before production may have taken place a substantial distance away.

Combi Works’ revenue logic and benefits

Every factory joining the system brings its own customers as users and each customer brings its own suppliers. Currently (spring 2019), the leasing service is free of charge to the users, but in future the pricing will be based on small transaction fees charged on the deals between the customers and suppliers.

Benefits to customers and end users

Service users have access to a sharing platform that enables factories to increase their machine usage rate and those needing production capacity to acquire facilities without owning factories. With the system, companies can access a wide range of information about various operators, which makes it easy to provide or acquire factory capacity. This leads to the more efficient use of factory equipment, which reduces the negative environmental impacts of manufacturing.