Roberto G. Michel

Enterprise mobile apps: save time, kill time, or something else?

A recent trip to visit my brother and his kids brought to life just how behind I am as a user of mobile technology. My brother, an attorney, uses an I-Pad for quick access to email, schedule, and travel info, but his kids also grab the iPad to play video games. My wife used her iPhone on the trip to take family pics and create quick Facebook posts. She also uses it for corporate email--though happily, not on this particular trip.

Meanwhile--I seem stuck in 2004--using my cell phone just for voice calls and to check voice mail. The key reason for this is that I do most of my work from my home office these days, and on the few business trips I take I usually lug a Windows laptop to check email. But as I look at the possibility of more business travel in 2012, I'm thinking about getting a smart phone or tablet soon. For one thing--my old circa 2005 laptop takes about 15 minutes to fully boot, get onto WIFI, and get the browser running. I also like how mobile devices seem to have good apps for entertainment and personal productivity.

In looking over my email the other day (the old fashioned way--on a desktop PC!), I came across a tidbit about the two key drivers behind mobile apps for consumers. In a recent Advertising Age webcast,  Patrick Moorhead, group management director of mobile platforms for Draftfcb in Chicago, posits  that mobile consumers are looking for either “something to save time with” or a “something to wase time with” when using their device. I tend to agree.

With a tablet or smart phone, you can kill some time with a video game, or use a tablet as an e-reader. But you can also save time by keeping up with your email, rearranging schedules or appointments on the fly, or using mobile apps from service providers like banks, insurers, or doctors and clinics. But is there another key driver behind mobile apps--especially when it comes to enterprise-class mobile apps?

In my career as a writer about enterprise software, at a basic level the best "apps" are usually about applying a company's resources in a faster, more effective way. If a company can use a Web-based system for collaborative product development, they might be able to shave months off a new product launch, and that might make a big difference in grabbing market share and profitability for the new product. In production and supply chain planning, "resource management" is king. If you can schedule a production line to fulfill more orders with less labor, less machine time, or by holding less inventory, profitibilty rises. Same story in the supply chain--if you can pair techniques like cross-docking with  supply chain monitoring software to speed up the distribution of outbound goods, that helps the bottom-line. What I'm wondering is, have enterprise mobile apps reached the point where they can help a company save resources and boost productivity, or are they still much like consumer mobile apps, some time-saving productivity tools for the individual, with hopefully less of the "time killer" aspect?

My guess is that enterprise mobile apps are already starting to help companies save resources, but they aren't the whole story on new technologies that optimize resources. Sure, enterprise mobile apps might help an executive catch an earlier flight, but to quickly re-optimize a supply chain, you might need a team of people accessing analytics, crunching real-time supply chain data, and then taking action. Some of this quick adjustment of supply chain resources might be done via mobile apps, but some people might be using a more conventional PC or laptop. And with the advent of "big data" analytics software supported by cloud computing, the wiser application of resources might rely on many types of devices that used to be "dumb," but are now smart and reporting data via the cloud. In the enterprise world, the biggest driver for mobile apps may end up being the way they can optimize resources, but in combination with technologies like big data and cloud computing.

As a technology-focused business journalist, I'm sure I'll be following these converging trends. As an average Joe user, I just want do a stuff like keep tabs on email, social media, and maybe read a book while on the move.

 

U.S. manufacturing's comeback getting good ink

Good to see that U.S. manufacturing, which I've covered in one form or another since the mid-1990s, is getting some encouraging coverage at its comeback, such as this recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek.

The story notes that according to a study by Boston Consulting Group, part of the reason for the U.S. comeback is that wages are increasing in China. Good article, though if it were longer, perhaps more could have been reported about the type of product innovation and technology innovation that U.S. manufacturers are so good at. For example, last September, I wrote an article in Insight on Manufacturing about how manufacturers in Wisconsin are using digital fabrication--which is roughly akin to quickly layering up an actual part from a digital file in the same way an ink jet printer layers ink onto a page to create a printed document--to rapidly make parts or prototypes. This is the sort of technology that gives U.S. manufacturers an edge when it comes to producing complex parts and assemblies in a very rapid turnaround time from concept to delivery.

 

Walleye run on the Fox River

Out biking yesterday, I was glad to see the walleye anglers out on the Fox River--getting into the action on the annual spring walleye run. There must have been a good 30 boats just downstream from the dam in De Pere, and plenty of people casting jigs or floating minnows from shore (see pics I snapped below from the De Pere bridge, and a shore view from Voyageur Park nearby).

It was a weekday, Friday, April 1, so there will probably be even more anglers out this weekend, even with the worsening weather. And the good walleye fishing extends downstream too--not just at the area right below the bridge and dam.

I've heard the locals tell me that the walleye fishing on the Fox River wasn't very good 30 or 40 years ago because of all the pollution, but it certainly has made a comeback. There are still PCBs in the fish, however, though the Fox River dredging project hopefully will alleviate that problem after the project is complete and we get a few fish generations down the line. That project is going well, as I reported on last fall for the publication Insight on Business. For the foreseeable future, there is a pretty strict fish eating advisory on the lower Fox river. You can find the notice here.

Below is a video I came across on You Tube that shows some walleye fishing on the Fox. These folks know how to jig for walleyes, and give some great advice. It appears to be from earlier this year when the air temps were warmer, but there are people fishing the river for walleye as soon as the ice melts. Watch the vid--because these folks know more about casting for walleyes than I do.

 

 

This is why keeping our rivers clean is a good idea. It's fun recreation for local people and tourists, and draws in dollars to local bait shops, fishing guides, convenience stores, pubs/eateries, and even hotels, since some people drive in for a weekend.

When people talk about the cost of environmental regulations, they should also consider the benefits that regulations and cleanup projects can bring over the long haul. It's a balancing act. Maybe in 20 years, the DNR can lift or loosen the health advisory for eating walleyes out the Fox--that will make the fishing the Fox River even more attractive. Fish on!

New drivers behind the bullish outlook for warehouse automation

This past week at ProMat 2011--a material handling trade show held at Chicago's McCormick Place--I got a chance to assess the outlook in industry toward investment in automation as our economy claws its way back to sustained growth. ProMat showcases all kinds of products used in warehouses--including some relatively low-tech items like pallets--but it's also the biggest show around for sophisticated systems like automated storage and retrieval (ASRS) systems and digitally controlled conveyor and sortation systems that can quickly shuttle and shuffle the exact mix of goods needed for delivery, all while using minimal human labor.

These types of systems are the technologies used in the warehousing operations of companies like Amazon, United Parcel Service, Walmart, and every major consumer goods company. Instead of using just people and lift trucks to handle goods, the big facilities tend to rely heavily on automation. The automation starts with software systems for order management (called enterprise resource planning or ERP systems at the corporate level, and warehouse management system, or WMS software, to plan goods movement in warehouses). The WMS typically integrates with a warehouse control system, or WCS software layer. It's the WCS that communicates with and coordinates the automation systems like sortation systems, ASRSs, or even robotic arms that automate repetitive tasks like building pallets. For a peek at some of these systems, take a look at this video report I compiled at ProMat.

Historically, one of the biggest drivers for the materials handling automation has been the ability to reduce labor. As I ventured onto ProMat's show floor to write stories for the official show daily produced by Modern Materials Handling, one the core questions I had on my mind was whether companies are investing in more automation before investing in more labor as the economy improves.

We all know that U.S. unemployment remains high, even while signs of an improving economy continue, such as positive readings for the nation's manufacturing index the past 19 months (through February 2011). But sales of automation equipment for warehouses also took a big hit during the recent recession. According to the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA), which sponsors Promat, material handling automation equipment shipments dropped 33  percent in 2009, and as of last September, were expected to rebound to 3 or 4 percent growth for 2010. According to a recent look at the state of the material handing industry from Modern Materials Handling, MHIA now expects that 2010 equipment shipments will actually do a bit better when the full 2010 numbers come in--about 7 percent growth. For 2011, the industry is expecting overall growth in the 10 percent to 11 percent range.

So are companies looking at implementing more automation as a way to keep up with distribution volume as the economy improves, rather than hiring more people? Well, it's probaby not that simple a tradeoff. For one thing, distribution and logistics is just one part of the economy, and can hardly be expected to solve our employment problems. Second, material handling system vendors sell worldwide, so their sales growth isn't tied just to the U.S. economy. Third--and this is a point I heard from a few people at ProMat--material handling automation isn't implemented just to reduce labor. It's also done to achieve a level of order accuracy that companies would be hard pressed to achieve with more labor alone.

At a ProMat press conference, I asked Chris Cole, CEO of Intelligrated, a major vendor of materials handling automation systems and integration services, if labor savings was still the key driver behind warehouse automation today. Not exactly, Cole said. For many companies, materials handling automation is a way to achieve a level of order accuracy and process improvement that you can't achieve manually. Not only can automation systems ensure high accuracy at high volume, they can also figure out how to pack containers or pallets so that they become easier to put away on store shelves. So end-user companies don't see warehouse automation simply as a replacement for labor, says Cole, but more so as a productivity enhancer that reaches out beyond the four walls of the warehouse. "Even in Third World regions where labor rates are lower, our customers are telling us that the capabilities of the automation have reached a point where [the systems] are able to do things and achieve an accuracy level that you can't achieve just with more labor," said Cole.

I heard a similar train of thought from other vendors at ProMat 2011. At the SICK Inc. booth--a vendor of sensors and automatic identification products--I discussed the concept of process improvement with John Ashodian, SICK's market manager for retail logistics. Ashodian demonstrated a new version of camera-based system called the ICR880 that uses SICK's vizualization software to troubleshoot the causes of bad bar-code reads. With this type of system, the warehouse facility not only has a high-speed, hands-off way to read bar codes on boxes on a conveyor line, if a read is bad, they have a diagnostic tool for pinpointing why, as Ashodian explains in the clip below.

 

Don't get me wrong, not all warehouses need automated sorting systems or camera-based reader stations. Some simply don't have the order volume or product mix/complexity to get enough payback from labor savings. But as I learned at ProMat, warehouse operations also are being pushed by customers and by internal efforts to continually improve order accuracy and the ease and reliability of working with shipments that come out into and out of a facility.

Government now has Asian carp director

As a fisherman who hails from Northern Illinois, the Asian carp is an oddity (it's a big fish that leaps from the water like a flying fish), but ultimately it is no laughing matter. That's why I'm glad to see the federal government has named an Asian carp director to oversee the control of this pest fish, which threatens to run rough shod over native species as it steadily extends its range northward, possibly into Lake Michigan.

The professional heading up the effort is John Goss, White House Council on Environmental Quality Asian Carp Director. Find out more about his organization on their official Web site.

I found out about the director being in place through a press release. It's strange to see "Asian Carp Director" in a headline because--at least in my warped mind--the capitalized title conjures up images of some sort of half-man, half-fish bureaucrat. Maybe if the title was "asian carp control director" I'd find it less odd. At any rate, I'm glad he's on the job. I still fish the Kankakee River in Illinois every year, and as far as I know, the Asian Carp hasn't made it into the Kankakee, or at least not upstream past the Wilmington dam. So good luck Asian carp director. Get 'er done!

Urban farming: hype or hope?

Yesterday morning, I stopped in at one of two farmers' market events held in Green Bay this winter. As planned, I scored some beets and a bit of grass-fed beef, but I also wanted to network with folks involved in organic agriculture.

At one visit, I discussed the need to balance large, traditional dairy operations with more naturally managed, grass-fed herds. The vendor raised some valid points such as the misconception that grass-fed cattle management takes considerably more acreage than traditional herd management, but he also threw out a startling statistic on another matter: a recent article in Forbes that says that by 2018, one-fifth of urban produce needs worldwide will be met locally. That seemed too good to be true, so I thought I'd track down the actual article.

As you can read for yourself, the 20 percent threshold for local produce production in cities is not attributed to any sort of study, but rather, is just one prediction in a multi-contributor collection of think pieces about what the future might hold. [The actual prediction states: "By 2018 at least one-fifth of urban food worldwide will be grown on rooftops and in former parking lots."] Hmm. Well, I just don't think that's a realistic scenario--more like a prediction to get people thinking. But there are some interesting and positive things going on with urban agriculture.

One is the work of healthy food entrepeneurs such as Will Allen in Milwaukee whose non-profit Growing Power focuses on urban produce farming. Allen's work has garnered national attention. Meanwhile, our First Lady is doing some great work to get school kids planting vegetable gardens. Another trend is "vertical farming," which is about using special structures to grow high volumes of produce skyscraper fashion in tight, urban areas. Then there are "micro-greens," which are varieties of smallish greens from vendors like Fresh Origins you can grow indoors on a window sill year round.

So maybe I'm too skeptical. Maybe by 2018, 20 percent of the produce needed in cities really will be grown right in our cities. It's a goal to shoot for, certainly, but if I were a futurist with a gambling streak, I wouldn't bet my jet-pack on it.

Medical billing weirdness: one bill for EKG; other for reading it

Yesterday I was taking care of some medical billing arising from my wife's recent rotator cuff surgery, and I came across a good example of medical billing weirdness. As part of the surgery prep, she had an electrocardiogram done. Turns out the clinic/hospital doing it had one bill for the EKG (about $174, network rate) and another $75 bill for the reading of the EKG by the doctor.

Really? Yes, I was plainly told by the clinic's billing department, two bills for one EKG. Since there is not much use in complaining to an administrator over the phone, I paid the patient portion after making sure the insurance paid their part. Of course, it seems our health care system could be much more efficient by streamlining bills and payments, though doing so is complicated by the legion of insurers, doctors, clinics, labs, and hospitals involved in providing even fairly routine care these days.

It's a far cry from the days when my father was a general practioner and surgeon (he practiced from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s--that's him in the pic at right as a young resident in the early '50s) in small town Illinois. I came across some of his patient bills from the early 1960s when I cleaned out his desk after my mother passed on. People paid him in cash for things like full-scale check-ups or even sewing up a laceration, which he did in his office if needed. Some of those bills were $10 or $12. His name was Moises Garcia Michel, M.D. He was born in 1918, and passed on in 1983, and did most of his medical career in St. Anne and Kankakee, Illinois.

By the time my Dad retired things had changed, but I remember he used to carry a black medical bag with him in his car, and bring it home in the evenings in case he needed to treat someone.  It reminded me of the Doctor Moonlight Graham character which Burt Lancaster played so well in the movie Field of Dreams. Those days are long gone, I'm afraid, though our health care system should look to those days for some lessons in simplicity.

Up close and personal with PCB dredging on the Fox

Much of my reporting for business stories is done via phone, so when I get the chance to get out, I usually jump at it. This was the case when Insight on Business asked me to go out onto the Fox River to report on the progress of a project to remove polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the river bottom.

Here's a link to the story in Insight on Business, but I thought I'd also stitch together some video I shot while I was out touring the dredges.

 

    

The project is going well, beating its production goals handily. It was also organized under a more flexible model in which regulators didn't dictate the precise methods to be used. I'm told this allowed for the use of hydraulic dredging (the kind with hoses) rather than insisting on mechanical dredging (the Hudson River PCB cleanup uses mechanical dredging).

PCBs are chemicals that were used in the production of carbonless copy paper decades ago. They don't stink up a river like excess phosphorous or suspended solids do, but the chemicals do end up in the tissue of fish, and are harmful to humans if we eat the fish or get PCBs directly on our skin (a concern for workers in the past). Hopefully, a few fish generations after the PCB cleanup concludes, the river's fish population will be safer to eat. It's already a good fishing river, especially known for its spring run of walleye, so if the fish were good for the fry pan, that would make the river even more attractive for recreation.

I was surprised to learn from this EPA backgrounder that PCBs were not banned until 1979, though  scientists, authors, and workers had concerns about PCBs many years before that. It's an interesting question whether companies should be held responsible for the full social or environmental costs of products or practices that aren't yet banned. I doubt the companies would be putting up money for the these PCB cleanups unless regulators had a good case for it. It makes me wonder whether some of the industrial practices we have going today--like trying to squeeze oil out of rocky soils in the Canadian Oil Sands region--are really as safe as we think, and if not, aren't we just leaving the cost of the cleanup or health damage to the next generation just so we can keep the price of gas a bit cheaper today?

I hope for the best with current practices, but also think we should err on the side of rigorous environmental oversight. Just think about last year's Gulf oil spill. OK, we need oil, but let's not cut corners on oversight.

The companies deemed the responsible parties for PCB contamination of the Fox are still figuring out who will pay for how much. At least a couple of the companies, admirably, moved ahead and funded a limited liability corporation that is the source of funding for the cleanup project. As an outdoorsman, I'm hopeful the rest of the funding will be hashed out and the cleanup project keeps on track. I'm not much of a walleye fisherman, but maybe the young anglers of today can look forward to a meal from the Fox in 15 or 20 years.

Didn't know our gadgets wasted electricity on AC to DC swap

While I've covered energy management and sustainability for some time, I didn't know our high-tech gadgets with chips in them need to internally covert alternating current (AC) power from the grid to direct current (DC) power, at least, not until I came upon an article in Bloomberg Businessweek today about a company called Nextek Power Systems. Interesting technology. Apparently, if the AC-to-DC swap were done at a single point in a building instead of inside our gadgets, we could all save electricity.

The article is worth a read, and Nextek Power Systems has some good background information on this conversion issue. Seems like there is much more we could be doing to increase energy efficiency in commercial buildings and homes.

Maybe one day, I'll have highly efficient DC electricity juicing all my gadgets, and a smart meter and user interface to watch the trends in my house and see where I can save. To date, my biggest accomplishment with home electricity was wiring a ceiling fan, so I have a ways to go with my electrical know-how.

Midwest group puts price tag on wind energy transmission corridors

Wind energy is growing in the Midwest, but faces challenges, including local opposition from residents who don't want wind farms near their properties, and the larger issue of clean energy legislation such as a cap & trade at the federal level, or renewable energy standards at the state level. But another challenge that faces wind energy is improving the transmission infrastructure so that the energy generated by wind farms can move more easily to the markets that need it.

This last challenge is being examined by a group called the Upper Midwest Transmission Development Initiative (UMTDI), a coalition formed by the governors of Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. According to an UMTDI executive summary, improving the "corridors" or lanes for wind energy transmission in the region will cost $3 billion, though this cost doesn't have to be incurred in upfront in one big chunk, and would hold benefits that last many decades. Interesting study to take a look at.

For the wind energy industry to really take off, three key factors appear to be involved: 1) passage of stronger clean energy legislation/incentives; 2) better transmission infrastructure; and 3) better wind siting rules and best practices for establishing wind farms so that they don't harm local quality of life and can more easily gain support. As to this last factor, take a look at this story from the New York Times that details noise concerns some people have with certain wind energy projects. The story is even-handed, despite the edgy headline treatment. My point is simply that wind siting best practices need to mature to pave the way for wind energy growth.