Category Archives: Production Operations

Drones Connect with RFID to Catalog Inventory

Posted on January 10, 2018 by | Leave a comment

A new application from MIT attempts to correct issues of inventory shrinkage ‘in the bins’ as they say.  They use a drone to read the RFID tags on items without sending a human out to scan the bins.

Watch out for flying objects at Home Depot!

  via Drones Connect with RFID to Catalog Inventory

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Posted in Advanced Computing, Logistics, Production Operations, Supply Chains

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American Airlines glitch leaves 15,000 Christmas flights without a captain

Posted on December 1, 2017 by | 1 comment

Got this story by way of the Loadstar.

Reading the story I am impressed by the level of incompetence management showed. But in the view of the traveler (customer) the union will be blamed. So more anti-union sentiment will be generated.

In this case it is clearly a management mess-up.  Why shouldn’t the union call them out?  Why should the union go overboard to help management out of the mess? Why should temporary and part time workers get overtime pay for standard hours (for airline crews) in violation of the union contract?

What customers see is a flight that is canceled. If management says “It’s the union’s fault!” it would be lying.  Laying blame on the union is not fair.

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via American Airlines glitch leaves 15,000 Christmas flights without a captain | World news | The Guardian

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Posted in Labor Economics, Logistics, Production Operations

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Are You Keeping the Right Amount of Inventory?

Posted on December 1, 2017 by | Leave a comment

An interesting case study of inventory. You can see that it still is an issue of great importance to businesses.

Accurate knowledge of demand flow is very important in predicting the amount of inventory to carry, if the product is selling fairly frequently.

The authors found that a few big customers were placing unusual big orders and that was driving outages.  We’ve known this for 30 or more years; I observed it at a disk drive company I was product manager for in Silicon Valley. Manage the big orders and you manage inventory.

But that does not reduce the value of inventory models and predictions of service level.

 

 

via Are You Keeping the Right Amount of Inventory?

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Posted in Logistics, Production Operations, Quantitative Methods, Service Management, Supply Chains

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