BellHawk Newsletter - October 2008

Tough Times or Great Opportunity?

"May you live in interesting times” is an ancient Chinese curse that certainly seems to apply to our current times. Also the ancient Chinese symbol for crisis is purported to be made up of the symbols for Danger plus Opportunity. Both of these have an element of truth; although the “Opportunity” seems to mostly lie in the ability of our politicians and financiers to make lots of money at the expense of the rest of us. Yes, once again, we got ripped off big–time.

But not all is black. The dollar has devaluated by 2:1 over the past 5 years and will, by my estimation, devalue against a basket of far–east currencies (including the Yuan) and the Euro by another 2:1 in the next 3 years (I was predicting 5 to 7 years but it takes a Government like we have now to really speed this up). I believe that this will make the USA hyper–competitive in manufacturing once again.

According to my contacts, the China manufacturing dragon is grinding to a halt as Joe Sixpack in the USA can no longer afford his new 60 inch LCD TV as he is out of work, cannot get any more credit, and is about to lose the home into which to put his new TV. But the world economy has not ground to a halt, it is just going through a major change.

Now is the time for manufacturing and other industrial companies in the USA to prepare for the upcoming dramatic increase in sales as we become the lowest total cost manufacturing country in the world. We might not have the lowest labor rates; but these already are less than 15% of the total cost of production and this cost, relative to our competition, is about to be halved (along with the value of the dollar). We have a great manufacturing infrastructure, plenty of energy (300 years supply of coal and oil–sands), and lots of natural resources.

So what should manufacturers and other industrial organizations do during the upcoming lull in demand (while the credit markets sort themselves out)? They should be putting in systems, such as barcode tracking systems, to make sure that they are world class competitors. This means operating as efficiently as possible and not wasting resources on expediting customer orders or recovering from employee mistakes or shipping orders late to customers. It also means having systems that can exchange data with customers' and suppliers' systems in real-time on a world-wide basis.

But, as you may correctly point out, many small and mid-size manufacturers and industrial plants do not have the capital financial resources to invest in new systems, especially with credit being so tight. So we at BellHawk Systems have come up with some innovative solutions including the ability for our clients to lease or rent these systems or even use them on a service basis with a remote host in a secure data center.

With some innovative arrangements, we are now able to offer tracking solutions that can cost our clients a fraction of one percent of their monthly operating budget. These solutions can pay back our clients several times their cost each month through improved operational efficiency, reduction in labor cost, and reduction in customer late shipment penalty and expedited shipping costs.

We want to help our clients not only survive but also thrive in these trying times. So please give us a call at 1-508-865-8070 or call one of our partners and we will do our best to help you to become a world–class competitor in the upcoming export boom.

Technology Corner

I often get asked why we use SQL Server and not MySQL as our main database for BellHawk. The answer is parallelism. With BellHawk, we can have as many as 30 or more inquiries into the database active at the same time. Many of these come from the wireless server module that initiates a new SQL thread every time it gets an inquiry from a wireless mobile computer. As these requests can come in every few seconds from each mobile computer, this places a significant load on the database server.

If you run SQL Server 2005 on a computer with 4 GBytes of memory it will keep most of the tracking database in memory. The many SQL threads are then able to access this at memory speeds resulting in a rapid response, in parallel, to many requestors of information. If we were to use MySQL, these requests would have to be handled one at a time, serially, with a substantial degradation in performance.

So while I think that MySQL is an excellent database for low transaction rate applications on Linux boxes (we use it to support web applications on our Apache webservers), I believe that SQL Server provides much higher performance in mission critical applications such as BellHawk.

BellHawk Blog and Tracking and Traceability Handbook

We have now implemented a Blog, moderated by Dr. Peter Green, where you can post you comments to this newsletter. Dr. Green will be posting ideas, reviews and commentary to this blog on a regular basis. You are invited to add your commentary.

We have also started to implement an on-line handbook on tracking and traceability. This will eventually end-up containing 100 or more short articles on topics of interest to operations managers and technical staff who have the responsibility for implementing or improving barcode and RFID tracking solutions.

Great YouTube Video

'Rocket Man' Yves Rossy completes English Channel crossing