Thursday, March 10, 2005

Starbucks I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Elk Grove Village (I think), IL. Love the coffee almost as much as the wireless Internet connection. The music is great, too. I haven't bought any of that, but the problem is I'm rarely at a Starbucks. I'm visitng my daughter up here while I attend NMW and visit my office in Chicago. The nearest Starbucks to my home in western Ohio is at least 50 miles away. Two thoughts. One, I've been here an hour and the constant stream of customers is amazing. What a franchise. Second, don't you find those walkie-talkie phones annoying? A woman is waiting for her latte chatting with someone. Most people speak more loudly on a mobile phone than in a normal conversation, but these things require a louder voice, plus you hear both sides of the conversation. That's one technology "advance" that I wish had stayed in the lab. 7:58:04 AM    comment []

National Manufacturing Week 3 Jane Gerold and I had a great conversation with Sudipta Bhattacharya, vice president for manufacturing at SAP. Unlike my experience at Oracle, SAP has a real story to tell to the manufacturing community. Its booth had several partners who showed how their add-ins work so seamlessly that it's totally transparant to the user. Anyway, back to Sudipta. He could tell the SAP story of Adaptive Manufacturing Networks that focuses on the keywords "Operations, Integration and Intelligence." The interesting part was when we started talking about real application of the principals in manufacturing. The real key according to Sudipta (and something I whole-heartedly agree with) is that we must get financial information to the floor. Operators should be able to relate metrics to finances, i.e., it is costing us (or making us) x amount of money for each change in the process. First and second level managers need to be able to see in real-time the financial impact of their decisions. Even better is the ability to evaluate the financial impact of decision alternatives before making the decision. A good partner to check out is Lighthammer. It has a piece of middleware software that adds intelligence to plant floor information entering the ERP. I introduced Automation World to Intermec. This company is doing some cool stuff at Ford that shows advances in RFID applications in the 14 years since I quoted an RFID solution to one of its plants. I hope to tell the story in AW soon. One last good meeting was with RuleStream. This is a good integrating application that works with 3D CAD and many other programs to apply "rules" to the quoting and product development system reaching over to the interface from engineering to manufacturing. I'll be writing some of their applications in automating some important business processes. The show was smaller and compact, and "automation" was a little lacking in the Automation Show, but still a little good information forthcoming. First time in over a year that I didn't run across a single reader, though. Hope that doesn't happen again. 7:24:59 AM    comment []