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 COLUMN
Telemetry saves money AS PROMISED, THIS is the second column in a random series of columns on how wireless technology can reduce costs for your company and thus possibly save jobs from the grim human resources reaper.
What they all have in common and the reason why your company even if it doesn't sell soda, make cars, or manufacture industrial equipment should pay attention to these solutions is that at the 10,000-foot level they all are capable of reducing costs and allow for a more efficient and intelligent use of your work force by managing the supply chain wirelessly. All these solutions do two things: give an item's location and provide critical data about that physical asset. "The problem with real-time decision support systems is they are disconnected from the systems they are managing. We offer real-time connectivity to the physical goods," says Dan Doles, WhereNet's CEO. WhereNet technology is GPS (Global Positioning System) in reverse. Rather than an item or a vehicle locating itself based on information from satellites, WhereNet's tag is a radio beacon that sends out its identifying code to an array of antennae that receive the signal and give an operator the beacon's location with an accuracy of 10 feet. Indoors the range is 250 feet to 350 feet, and outdoors it's 750 feet to 1,000 feet. The tags are self-powered with a battery that lasts from five years to seven years, and the cost is about $50 per tag. Besides determining location, the tag is also capable of sending other data on the same "blink," as they call it. Coca-Cola uses the tags as a yard-management system for perishable containers of syrup sitting in the hot Atlanta sun. The tag tells the yard manager something like, "I haven't moved in two days, and you've got beaucoup bucks about to be wasted if I spoil; so come get me." This usage is fairly straightforward, but wait till you hear what Ford does. Ford is currently running numerous WhereNet-powered applications at 20 factories worldwide. There's a container-management system that tells a manager where every reusable container is and what's inside. Each container has a tag on it, and each is filled with car parts. These containers are sitting in a yard outside the factory. In the old days, when carrying costs were relatively inexpensive and product life cycles were longer, the manager might send someone out to the yard to look around and open each container in case it wasn't labeled. Today, with short product life cycles, a company can't afford to finance that kind of inventory system. A yard-management system tracks all the truck trailers coming in and alerts a supervisor to where and when the inventory was dropped off, at what dock, for instance, and whether it was late. It then takes that information and plugs it right in to the back-end inventory database. The parts-call system is neat. An operator on the manufacturing line has a WhereCall button for each part. When the operator gets down to, say, seven mufflers, the operator pushes the WhereCall button and an alert notifies the floor manager that this operator needs more mufflers on his or her line. Integrated into Ford's eSmart system, that same message is sent directly to the supplier to help them determine when to deliver more mufflers to the factory. Finally, every car rolling off the assembly line is tagged so that, when the transporters come to pick them up for delivery to the dealers, Ford knows exactly where to find them. FMC -- a leading supplier of airport ground-support equipment such as passenger-boarding bridges, cargo loaders, push-back tractors, baggage tug tractors, and deicing trucks -- has 2,000 such pieces of equipment tagged for an airline at its major hub. At beginning of every shift, line supervisors at the airport spend their first hour and a half finding the equipment because no one puts it back where it belongs. Not anymore. Better still, there is additional information that can ride along with the location data. With WhereCall, not only does the airline know where their deicing trucks are, they also know how much deicing fluid remains in the truck. Rather than sending an empty or half-full deicer that might be good enough to deice a 737 but not a 747, the supervisors know what's available and where. If wireless is saving your company money, let me know at ephraim_schwartz@infoworld.com. Ephraim Schwartz is an editor at large in InfoWorld's news department. He doesn't yet have a system that lets his editors know where he is. MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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