Thin Air: How Wireless Technology Supports Lean ... - Prepaid MVNO

94 • Thin Air: How Wireless Technology Supports Lean Initiatives
And that diverts resources away from production goals. “The value proposition
of shop-floor-to-top-floor integration is often not well thought out,”
said CEO Raj Saksena of Omnitrol Networks. “Information on the shop
floor is usually for the shop floor,” and of no use to anyone at the back end.
Certainly, the C-level executive needs intelligence into shop floor operations,
but just how much intelligence? The answer is, which intelligence
can that executive use?
Let’s undertake a theoretical exercise in purposeless integration. United
Parcel Service (UPS) has speedometers on the dashboards of its brown
trucks. But maybe there’s a more efficient way to process the information
of speed. We have the capability to equip vehicles with remote speedometers,
which the drivers never see. These could be represented on a sophisticated
“executive dashboard” that allows a regional manager—no, wait,
let’s go right to the top floor—that allows UPS’s VP of Operations for the
Americas to monitor driver speed, and manage that speed “by exception,”
phoning any driver that he believes is driving too fast for safety, or too
slow for efficiency. Such connectivity would provide seamless visibility
from the edge to management, from the shop floor to the top floor—and
it is absolutely possible, with remote sensing and cellular signals! It is also
absolutely purposeless.
Question Integration, Always
When faced with an integration decision, you need to answer four primary
questions:
1. Is the intelligence truly necessary, or value-adding? (Or otherwise
required, for example, in ePedigree requirements?)
2. Who specifically requires the intelligence?
3. Is back-end integration absolutely necessary?
4. Is historical data absolutely necessary?
Chances are, a good many classes of information are like vehicle speed:
necessary in the moment, to a specific individual. Retaining and monitoring
the information serves no purpose to anyone but that individual.
Passing intelligence through the ERP or warehouse management system
(WMS) may simply delay it, obscure it from those who need it, or worse,
discourage collecting that intelligence at all.
© 2010 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC