Rise of the Robots

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APRIL 1, 2014

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robots industrial

“The exponential growth in the power of silicon chips, digital sensors and high-bandwidth communications improves robots just as it improves all sorts of other products,” writes The Economist’s special report (March 29-April 4, 2014).  Three other factors are also at play.

One is that robotics R&D is getting easier. New shared standards make good ideas easily portable from one robot platform to another. A robot like Rethink Robotics’s Baxter, with two arms and easy, intuitive programming interface, would have been barely conceivable 10 years ago. Now you can buy one for $25,000. A second factor is investment. (The biggest robot news of 2013 was that Google bought eight promising robot startups.) The third factor is imagination. In the past few years, clever companies have seen ways to make robots work as grips on film sets and panel installers at solar-power plants. Aerial robots—drones– let farmers tend their crops in new ways, give viewers and broadcasters new perspectives on events, monitor traffic and fires, look for infrastructure in need of repair, and more.

While society may benefit greatly, robots’ growing competence may make some human labor redundant. Aetheon’s Tugs, for instance, which take hospital carts where they are needed, are ready to take over much of the work that porters do today. Kiva’s warehouse robots make it possible for Amazon to send out more parcels with fewer workers. Click here to watch a great 3 minute video on Amazon’s robots. Driverless cars could displace millions of people employed behind the wheel today.

The advent of robots that are cheap and safe enough to be used outside big factories is one reason for a resurgence of interest in robotics over the past few years.  Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that manufactures and assembles electronics, is aiming to robotize much of its operation with hundreds of thousands of its own relatively cheap Foxbots.  Car companies use the lion’s share of industrial robots; they account for over 50% of robot installations in the U.S.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

Keeping Some Slack in the Operating Room

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MARCH 28, 2014

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hospitalOperating rooms at St. John’s Regional Health Center, an acute-care hospital in Missouri, had been running at 100% capacity. When emergency cases—which make up about 20% of the full load—arose, the hospital was forced to bump long-scheduled surgeries. As a result, doctors often waited several hours to perform 2-hour procedures and sometimes operated at 2 a.m. Staff members regularly worked unplanned overtime. The hospital was constantly behind, according to this interesting article in Strategy + Business(Spring, 2104).

The rather surprising solution: Leave one room unused. Crazy idea? The facility was already being squeezed, and now comes a recommendation to take away even more capacity?

On the surface, St. John’s lacked operating rooms. But what it actually lacked was the ability to accommodate emergencies. Because planned procedures were taking up all the rooms, unplanned surgeries required a continual rearranging of the schedule—which had serious repercussions for costs and even quality of care. The key to finding a solution was the fact that the term unplanned surgery is a bit misleading. The hospital can’t predict each individual procedure, but it knows that there will always be emergencies. Once a room was set aside specifically for unscheduled cases, all the other operating rooms could be packed well and proceed unencumbered by surprises. The empty room thus added much-needed slack to the system. Soon after implementing this plan, the hospital was able to accommodate 5.1% more surgical cases overall, the number of surgeries performed after 3 p.m. fell by 45%, and revenue increased. And in the two years that followed, the hospital experienced a 7 and 11% annual increase in surgical volume.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

The Barcode’s Intelligent New Rival

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MARCH 24, 2014

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Thin film technology

In June 1974 history was made at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, with a ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It was the first time a commercial item bearing a Universal Product Code was scanned by a cashier at the checkout. Forty years on, the barcode has transformed the world of commerce by providing reliable product identification, tracking and pricing. Nearly everything now comes with a barcode.

As revolutionary as it was, the barcode has limited abilities, reports The Economist (March 8, 2014). It can impart only the information it was printed with and that can be read by an optical device. The next generation of labeling contains tiny printable electronics able to generate, store and share information. The technology behind “smart labels” is a flexible film of electronics that can be printed like a barcode. The memory circuits which can be used by smart labels to store information are printed as a film of ferroelectric polymer sandwiched between two electrodes. A tiny 20-bit memory label can store over 1 million combinations.

Yet another advancement is called Near Field Communication (NFC). This allows a user to tap an NFC tag with a portable device, like a smartphone, to send or receive data. NFC is a more sophisticated version of RFID and is already used by some contactless payment systems. By incorporating NFC, smart labels will be able to communicate wirelessly. Besides conveying product codes, applications include recording storage times and temperatures for perishable goods like food and pharmaceuticals. Smart labels might even be programmed to automatically discount their prices in response to marketing campaigns. To gain widespread use, smart labels will need to be cheap. Basic printed-memory labels can be produced for around 2 cents. Printed sensor-labels cost 50 cents, compared with $10 or more for a system using conventional microelectronics.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.