Supply Chain View

Sometimes people tell me that 5S only applies in factories, and if they’ve been exposed to the “inactive banana” school of dim-witted implementation I can’t blame them. But here’s a cautionary tale that might persuade you that the principles – intelligently applied – are sound. Supply Chain View has been “off air” for a while [...]

Last week I was talking to a colleague who had been involved in a pre-sales pitch with an RFID technology partner. He had come out of the presentation feeling very frustrated – he hadn’t felt he had learned any more about RFID than the very basic stuff he already knew, and certainly not enough to [...]

Paul Currion from humanitarian.info has written recently about Fritz Institute’s Helios Humanitarian Logistics software. This is a fascinating project: Fritz describes Helios as “a comprehensive supply chain technology solution that brings order to disaster relief, helping humanitarian organizations provide aid to people quickly and more efficiently” Paul notes that the first implementation of the system, [...]

The BBC reported last week that UK online retailing grew by 33.4% to £10.9bn last year. Today the headline was that supermarket Kwik Save was closing 79 stores in a bid to stay afloat. The former story is a well attested trend, and putting it next to the latter is to make a point in [...]

On the BBC’s Today programme this morning, business reporter Greg Wood interviewed Neill Denny, editor in chief of the Bookseller about “print-on-demand”. New technology allows book stores to print a single copy of a book for a customer. I don’t suppose this is ever going to happen for the latest Harry Potter or Bridget Jones, [...]

BBC News reports today on the way the big ERP vendors are targeting the SME sector. Another article from the same site asks whether small firms need big software. If I were feeling cynical I might ask whether small firms need systems that constrain their business processes, will never have core business parameters altered (because [...]

Hitachi have announced the smallest RFID chips to date – only 0.05mm x 0.05mm in dimension. They are so small that to the human eye they resemble particles of dust, and so thin they can be embedded in paper. Hitachi’s smallest RFID tag to date, the tiny Mu chip, is 64 times larger and has [...]

I have just seen this BBC story on Toshiba’s reusable paper technology. The innovation is a form of PET plastic paper with a thermally-active layer that allows each sheet to be erased and reprinted around 500 times. Their thermal printer will output around 12 sheets a minute.