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Search and Ye Shall Find Manufacturing Efficiency

Posted August 02, 2007 11:43 AM by Sharkles

At a recent Rockwell conference in Orlando, noted author Geoffrey Moore ("Crossing the Chasm") remarked that the growing success of automation integration has forced a "new metaphor for running a business efficiently: search." For 20 years the foundation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, database technology, has generated so many data-generating nodes that the real need becomes finding answers fast through search mechanisms. The answers exist in all those piles of data, but finding them is the chore. In the near future, getting answers quickly through search will move to the top of the prerequisites for efficient manufacturing operations.

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#1

Re: Search and Ye Shall Find Manufacturing Efficiency

08/05/2007 3:59 PM

Can anyone understand translate this gibberish?

"'... "new metaphor for running a business efficiently: search."..."

This is meaningless drivel...

What metaphor?...I see no mataphor...

is 'search' ? the mataphor.

Running a business is a 'search'?...

Maybe it's a banana? or a game of golf...?

If you remove all the padding and nonsense there is no content.

Or maybe I just don't have the patience.

Where do these people learn to write?

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#2
In reply to #1

Re: Search and Ye Shall Find Manufacturing Efficiency

09/11/2007 12:12 PM

Nice Kitty, be NICE NOW...

Anyone called upon to make a presentation has to appear and sound erudite in addition to being smooth talking and in full command of politically correctness with respect to all things.

Naturally to the great unwashed such as us "injinears" it is all BS and drivel.

A business is run on the basis of past group/company experience, the experience of contemporaries and forecasts of the future need for product/services etc. SS

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#3

Re: Search and Ye Shall Find Manufacturing Efficiency

01/18/2008 10:55 AM

I followed the link to the AutomationWorld website. I would venture to guess that it would be impossible to squeeze more ads and sponsored links onto the page without having to abbreviate the text some.

(and I know that "impossible" is a hard word for engineers to swallow)

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#4

Re: Search and Ye Shall Find Manufacturing Efficiency

03/31/2008 10:05 AM

It reminds me of what Noam Chomsky said about the job of intellectuals. It is to make simple concepts sound as complicated as possible.

Having said that, he does have a point if I translate "management speak" correctly.

Example: We had a cold glud dispenser that quit working. It's purpose was to add stability to pallets of stacked boxes by putting a small strip on top of each box.

After seeing much too much in the way of unstable pallets of beer, I asked my boss why we couldn't fix it. He said that the only indentification we had was a logo on the machine and there was no literature "upstairs". My job was turning wrenches on the afternoon shift in maintenance. I immediately wrote down the name of the company and called the research dept at our local library. Ten minutes later they sent me the adress and phone number of that company. Of course they just checked it out in Thomas Register.

It seems Mr. Moore may be talking about institutional paralysis which certainly is rampant.

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