Build vs. Buy

I was reminded today about one of the key decisions a CIO must make when evaluating new applications - build vs. buy. Building a custom application is time consuming, costly, risky, and often painful. However, sometimes it does make sense.

The key to the decision lies in the business strategy and the key differentiators for the business. Jim Collins, in his book "Good to Great," talks about the hedgehog concept - the idea that a company should focus all resources on the areas where they excel. This includes IT resources.

If the business has found a way to perform a particular function in a unique manner that provides competitive advantage - then it would be hard to find a pre-built solution that you can buy to automate this function. This is the area where it's worth building a custom solution and maintaining that competitive advantage.

However, other areas of the business that do not directly contribute to a unique differentiator should easily be satisfied with off-the-shelf solutions.

The bottom line: Invest in the aspects of the business that set you apart from the pack and don't worry about using standard common tools for those aspects that don't.

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Making warehouse automation stick

Warehouse Automation systems, like other systems, sometimes create more work (or at least perceived more work) for warehouse personnel.

Taking a warehouse and logistics facility from a paper based organization to a systems based organization presents many technical and managerial challenges. Keeping inventory accurate using handheld computers for recording material movements and inventory transactions can be an arduous process for warehouse employees. The 'big' benefits from a warehouse automation initiative are often in other functional areas of the company - not just the warehouse.

Like most other systems' initiatives, include the users in key steps of the implementation process to create ownership and awareness. For example:

• The handhelds are new toys - include all members of the warehouse when selecting and evaluating the new toys. Options include keyboard layout, displays (color or monochrome), keyboard size (watch out for those big fingers!), form ('gun style', 'brick style', 'PDA style', 'tablet style', etc.)
  
• Warehouse location labeling has many options - create a focus group to help design the layout and have warehouse employees practice finding locations using different labeling and numbering schemes

The more employees are included in the design and implementation of the new system, the more they'll understand the issues, challenges, and ultimate benefits.

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Handheld computers - plenty of options/tradeoffs

We're about to go live with our new Warehouse Automation System. We've tested and evaluated several handheld computers. In the end, we couldn't get the exact configuration we wanted.

First, there's different form factors - gun style, brick style, PDA style, wearable units, truck mounted units, and more. We quickly ruled out wearable and truck mounted units because we wanted more flexibility in deployment than these units offered. PDA units were not rugged enough and did not provide a large enough keyboard - we wanted units that were at least rated to withstand a 4 foot drop onto concrete. We quickly narrowed our search to industrial style units that looked like a rounded brick of varying sizes with or without a pistol grip and trigger. The pistol grip proved to be to bulky and everybody preferred the regular brick-style industrial unit.

The next key option was the scanner itself. There's at least several different types and they vary in their ability to scan at long range and their accuracy. Different scanners from different manufactures also vary in their ability to scan at angles and the accuracy based on different scanning surfaces. One scanner from Symbol has long range and short range capabilities (others are optimized for one or the other) and has great accuracy.

The last big option for us is the keyboard. We wanted a keyboard with separate alpha keys and separate numeric keys.

Other options included bluetooth, WLAN, color/monochrome screen, etc.

But ... although we could mix and match various options to design the ideal unit for our needs, we could not get the high end long range scanner in a brick style unit. The long range scanner is only available in the pistol grip unit. C'est la vie. We'll try them for the next few days and weeks and see if we have to make an adjustment.

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Microsoft Sharepoint - An intranet platform?

I used the first version of Sharepoint years ago. Recently, I've been experimenting with Sharepoint version 2 (although version 3 is due out momentarily) and believe it can be the platform for a very robust company intranet.

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