Mr. Bill was bored. Bored, bored, bored. He was so bored that he thought he would have a wander down to the shops for a mooch around. Mr. Bill hates shopping so that just shows how dreadfully bored he was.
I was talking with my brother-in-law about one of the Rugby League Challenge Cup matches and he used a wonderful phrase about the performance of one of the teams – abject normality.
What a stupid thing to do. You take two disparate entities, from entirely different backgrounds, with completely different ways of communicating and shove them together. What could possibly go wrong?
Some uneducated people seem to think that the most intense emotional event that one can experience is the birth of a child. These people have obviously never been through a warehouse system go-live. The birth of a new system is always intense and you always remember the people you have around you when the great moment arrives.
About 100 years ago, some stupid old men, a bit like me, decided that some small bits of France and Belgium were worth fighting over. Huge amounts of effort, planning, time, equipment and, unfortunately, lives were expended to move the boundary between two huge masses a few metres either way. Some people think that such foolishness was the product of the early 20th century, but let me tell you that the same nonsense and muddled thinking is happening right here, right now and in the warehousing world.
At the risk of alienating one of the great global corporations and many of their customers, I hate Excel.
I hate Excel because people use it for the wrong job, particularly in the warehouse environment for reporting.
Here’s two case studies about how IoT software can stop recalls due to labelling errors, and increase production efficiency.
There’s the obvious benefits for connecting your production line devices to SAP. You can control them from a central point. SAP does the work of selecting which label template you need. And, you can send data to them at the touch of a button, instead of having an operator manually keying in data into every individual machine. But all that communication is very one-way. And we all know in any good relationship, communication needs to be a two-way process. So, what might your devices be wanting to tell you?
Without wishing to reveal how long I’ve been in this industry, I’ve been hearing the phrase “this is the year of RFID” for at least 15 years. But it’s never quite taken off like everyone has been expecting.
RFID is pretty cool technology and given the right application it can solve a lot of business challenges, so what’s stopping everyone from getting on board?
