Smart gardening, farming and modern technology for agricultural. Male gardener or farmer using tablet with empty screen and working on plantation with blooming apple trees with white flowers, cropped
Since those first microprocessor products first came out in the 1970s (calculators, microwave ovens, etc.) we have seen a rapid acceleration of technology in the workplace and in our homes. It’s a good bet that in your home today you have more computing power than NASA had to send astronauts to the Moon. We are in the middle of a ‘smart revolution’ that leaves many of us feeling a little dumb about how to understand and use all this smart technology.
The term “Smart” for technology actually started as an acronym – Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology – but has evolved over the years to encompass any device with local computing power that can collect data, share the data with other devices, and then act on the data. Think about the first Apple ‘Smart phone’ where Apple created a phone that also had various sensors on it to know your location, the temperature, motion, and a camera and had the capability to share that information over a cellular network. Of course, when people got hold of the smartphone they immediately wondered “what else can I do with it?” and the next thing we know there are thousands of applications – apps – available to download to the phone. Now that phone becomes a node in a network of interconnected devices sharing data; the Internet of Things (IoT).
Think about all the devices we have today in our homes for security, convenience, and entertainment that are part of the IoT. We have video doorbells (Ring is a great example) that allow us to view who is at our homes no matter where we are. We have refrigerators that can tell us remotely their temperature and even give us a picture of what is inside as well as voice assistants (Alexa) that allow us to monitor and command devices in our homes such as lights, washers, and even EV chargers. Entertainment was the first way these devices got into our homes for gaming and now with streaming video. Nanowerk.com estimates that by 2030 there will be 15 devices connected to the internet for every person on the planet! How do we keep up with all this technology and not be overwhelmed by it?
Technology in business has changed the way we work and interact with our customers and colleagues. Just three years ago who would have predicted that a significant portion of our workforce would be working remotely using video conferencing, cloud-based shared data, and a host of other collaboration technologies? We see ‘smart technologies’ impacting major all sectors of our economy:
Smart Factories with interconnected devices to control processes and share data with partners and customers anywhere in the world.
Smart Logistics allows tracking and tracing through the logistics chain, warehousing, and all the way to the end-user.
Smart Agriculture uses IoT sensors to gather data from the fields and allow farmers to be much more efficient to feed a growing population.
Smart Healthcare with sharing of data across a network of providers and even telehealth to allow people in underserved rural areas to have access to specialists.
Smart Cities using an IoT network of sensors and machines throughout a city’s infrastructure and services to develop, deploy, and promote sustainable development practices to address growing urbanization challenges.
So how do we navigate this bewildering sea of technology to make our businesses and communities “smart”? The answer lies in the main attribute that drives the smart revolution – connectivity – in this case connecting with knowledgeable people. With such a wide array of smart technology solutions, you need to have a network of trusted individuals to help you use these technologies to solve your real-world everyday problems.
That’s where INGITEQ, a division of The Ginn Group, comes in with experts in engineering and information technology to help you identify and analyze your needs, then develop a set of solutions that balance technology and cost to best suit your business model.
Lately, supply chain disruptions have become commonplace as we deal with a worldwide pandemic, geopolitical tensions, rising fuel costs, and a shortage of workers. When we have a well-functioning global supply chain, we can employ just-in-time and outsourcing strategies to reduce costs, but we are taking on significant risk if we don’t at least ask the question “what do we do if the supply chain is disrupted?”
Some of this risk is “baked into” our products based on our selection of components and vendors in the design phase. Product developers are focused on technical and cost issues with the supply chain issues usually considered well down into the design process. We look at the current capabilities of the vendors to deliver, but usually don’t consider the various scenarios that can impact key component availability ranging from the vendors’ business considerations to large-scale geopolitical issues. To be able to keep our business moving we need to have a “Plan B” and maybe C, D, and even E.
For example, I once had a customer who was developing a new product offering and was deciding between two vendors for the key component which was highly complex and designed specifically for this product – not off the shelf. Company A was large with a great technical capability and was judged to be a very low technical risk, but my client would be a relatively small customer and might be easily forgotten when bigger customers came calling with orders.
Company B was smaller with the good technical capability to design and produce the component but was judged to have a bit higher technical risk. However, for Company B this project would be their biggest project and a high priority in the company – they would do almost anything to keep my client happy. I recommended that the client accept a bit more technical risk upfront but avoid future supply chain risk by selecting Company B.
However, the client was very risk-averse to the product launch, so they selected Company A. The product launch went well and had great customer acceptance, so much so that the client needed to scale up dramatically to meet customer demand. Unfortunately, the product launch also ignited a very serious response from established players in that market segment so now Company A was inundated with large orders from much larger companies – my client’s competitors.
When my client approached Company A for another round of production, Company A did not have the capacity to fill the order in a reasonable time frame while switching to another supplier would entail serious delays to recertify the components. The bottom line is that my client ultimately went out of business because they could not get the components in time to scale up to ward off their competitors.
The lesson here is that early in the design phase of any product or service we must consider the impacts of supply chain disruptions and have alternatives in place. Look beyond the simple how many, how much, how fast metrics to look at factors that could impact a supplier’s ability to meet your needs as conditions change. When possible, this means for key components having more than one source, preferably in different regions, even if this means accepting somewhat higher costs. Nobody likes higher costs but that must be weighed against the cost to your company of not being able to provide your product to your customers.
For innovative solutions for your supply chain and product design needs, contact us today.
All businesses must learn to adapt to the ever-changing marketplace with even a holiday icon like Santa Claus evolving his massive North Pole workshops and global distribution system to bring joy to kids of all ages each Christmas Eve. Imagine if your company had to manage a global supply chain constantly adapting to the newest gift ideas, warehousing your production for 12 months followed by a frenzy of distribution in a 24-hour period!
To meet this challenge, Santa’s Workshop has adopted the latest in innovation culture and automation technologies. Innovation is more than a buzzword; innovation is essential to ensuring that the Workshop is on the cutting edge of developing new products, services, and processes to get the right toys to meet the individualized needs of each child. Recent innovations at The Workshop include an overhaul of its information technology infrastructure using ‘artificial intelligence’ along with ‘Santa Intelligence’ to maintain an accurate “Naughty and Nice” list. Next was the application of the latest automation technologies – programmable logic controllers (PLCs), variable frequency drives (VFDs), automated level control, PID loops, and others – to produce a wider range of toys in ever greater numbers. And don’t forget the Elves who were involved in every step of the process to ensure safety and a great working environment. Happy elves are productive elves!
With Covid impacting the global supply chain, even Santa’s Workshop had to innovate their Supply Chain Management to keep the flow of material coming to maintain a steady workload for the elf staff. With warehousing of gifts for most of the year, the ELF Team (Elf Logistics & Facilities) oversees everything from production equipment maintenance, building maintenance, to dining halls (an elf has to eat). Then on the big night, the distribution team takes the lead to stage all the gifts with the Flight Department ensuring that the sleigh and reindeer are in tip-top shape and exceeding all international airworthiness regulations!
Being Santa is a big job and he has constantly had to innovate across the centuries to deliver the joy of the season. Even though we don’t deliver all our services in one night, we all can learn lessons from Santa in our businesses as we push to serve our customers throughout the year.
The Ginn Group and INGITEQ wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
This part of our two-part blog on Foundational Challenges Facing Atlanta & Most Communities is excerpted from a talk given in April 2021 by R. Steven Justice to the Georgia Tech Executive Round Table Spring Conference which focused on “Atlanta Next” – issues facing the metro Atlanta area and potential solutions. Part two will be posted on December 10, 2021.
Introduction
My background is in the aerospace industry where I worked on many cutting-edge programs before joining the Georgia Department of Economic Development in 2010 as the Aerospace Director and later Executive Director of the Center of Innovation program. During my years with the Georgia Centers of Innovation, I learned quite a bit about the needs of our communities large and small across Georgia and how our core infrastructure impacts communities and business.
In this blog today I talk about two of four foundational challenges that face the Atlanta area and apply across all our communities. These are challenges that could stimy or even bring growth to a halt but offer great opportunities for emerging companies and leaders to make your communities a positive example to the region and nation. I’m going to give you lots of facts along the way, hey I am an engineer, but I hope it gives you something to think about.
Transportation
Transportation is at the very core of Atlanta’s existence since the city was founded in the 1840s as the junction of three railroads. Railroads represented the latest technology of the day, the steam engine, harnessed to allow transportation of people and goods overland at a level never seen before. Before that, cities were usually located near the coast or along rivers, but the railroads allowed Georgia to expand inland independent of those waterways to take advantage of the vast natural resources of Georgia.
Atlanta became the railroad hub for the southeast. Then as the next wave of transportation technology hit, namely the internal combustion engine, Atlanta became the hub of a road network eventually leading to three major interstate highways crossing here. And in the 1960s city leaders invested heavily in our airport which became the busiest in the world. Atlanta is now a major transportation and supply chain hub for rail, road, and air – just look at all the distribution centers everywhere – but our success has led to congestion and gridlock which threatens our continued growth. We keep building more roads, more MARTA rail lines, and more runways but at some point, we simply run out of space and money. We must build a more efficient transportation system.
Let’s look at the transportation problem that we as individuals face every day – how to get to work in Atlanta. We buy expensive capital assets, cars, to get us where we need to go. The average one-way commute in Atlanta is just over 30 minutes – we drive to work then park the car for 8 hours, drive back home, maybe do a side trip or two, then park the car until the next morning. That capital asset sits idle roughly 22 hours of the day taking up space and our money. This is a highly inefficient system.
Public transportation is one alternative but works best along high population density routes. It also does not address “the last mile” to get people from the rail or bus stop to their destination. We’ve recently seen the emergence of personal transportation services that make it uber easy to get a lift from where you are to where you want to go. But now we can leverage new automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to make those cars driverless and autonomous. This promises to lower costs and improve efficiency.
Imagine a metro area where you don’t own a car and all the capital and maintenance costs that go with it – you simply use the app on your phone to get reliable transportation service whenever and wherever you want it.
Now you arrange a pickup in the morning, the pod arrives, and you can now use those 30 minutes of commute time to relax or even work. The pod then goes off to serve other people all day long before you use the service again in the evening to go home. People who use public transportation can use the pods waiting at the MARTA station to take them the last mile to their destination. People who can’t drive now use the pods to go to the store or doctor appointments; kids can get home from after-school activities more easily. These pods keep moving all day only returning to their maintenance facility for fueling, maintenance, and cleaning. Sounds like a future I want to experience.
As we move down the road of transportation-as-a-service, there are numerous impacts to our society in how we design roads, how we integrate these pods with larger autonomous busses and trains to build an efficient network for everyone.
Now that we don’t need big parking lots everywhere, how do we repurpose that space? Maybe more green space? It changes the urban and suburban planning model in ways we can’t yet fully grasp.
Energy
Energy drives our transportation system and everything else in our economic system. As a society, we’ve gotten used to energy on demand and everything grinds to a halt when it’s not there – just look at Texas in early 2021 during historic cold weather. Germany had a similar experience in early 2017 when they had 6 weeks of cloudy and practically windless weather. It was so disruptive they even named it – “Dunkelflaute”, translated meaning “dark doldrums”. Germany had moved forcefully toward renewable energy – wind and solar – and started retiring most of their fossil fuel and nuclear plants. “Germany was forced to recommission coal power plants to simply keep the lights on” according to an article of the time. So, it’s clear we need an energy system that is diverse in its sources and with enough excess capacity to handle disruptions due to weather and other issues.
How are we in Atlanta and Georgia? Georgia imports over $26 billion in fossil fuels each year to fuel our electric powerplants and factories, mostly natural gas with the use of coal dwindling, along with gas and diesel for transportation. None of those fuels are produced in Georgia, so that’s $26 billion dollars we send out of state each year. Georgia is one of the top ten states for electricity from nuclear, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all electricity generation. And we have more capacity coming online soon. Solar and wind account for another 10% of our electricity generation and are growing each year. But as more of our transportation system switches to electric systems, the draw on our electrical grid will grow even more.
What do we do? We need to keep pushing technologies to make safer nuclear reactors, which have no greenhouse gas emissions and aren’t affected by the weather. The anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s stymied nuclear power plant construction and research resulting in more coal power plants to meet the demand. We accepted, for a time, more greenhouse emissions to avoid the issues with nuclear. Our new nuclear options include small modular reactors, advanced fission, and hopefully fusion.
We must invest in further efficiency gains in solar panels from the roughly 20% level of today to around 30% – which is within reach – to increase our solar power production by 50% in the same footprint. We also should invest in technologies for wind, tidal, and hydropower that are appliable to our region and compatible with the environment.
But fossil fuels will be part of the mix for some time to come, especially in areas like aviation where batteries and fuel cells just won’t have the power density to displace liquid fuels in the foreseeable future. What do we do?
You can’t drive across Georgia without noticing that we have lots and lots of biomass. Arizona has deserts and sunlight, we have trees, trees, and more trees. In fact, our Forestry Commission estimates that we could more than double the commercial harvesting of trees in Georgia and still be below the sustainability line for tree growth.
On one hand, we have lots of biomass and on the other hand, lots of need for liquid fuels – what we need is the technology to turn that biomass into cost-competitive, drop-in carbon-neutral fuels that can replace the fuels we import now. We have the technology to make these fuels from biomass, but we need to bring the cost per gallon down to be competitive with fossil fuels.
Imagine not sending billion dollars each year out of state, but instead, those dollars going to our tree farmers and local refiners to supply our fuel needs ourselves – what a dramatic economic impact that would be… and a good for our environment.
Conclusion
There you go – transportation and energy – two of four foundational needs and challenges that will support all other growth and advances in our communities. These areas are ripe for innovation with tremendous potential benefits to our community and to society. At The Ginn Group and our engineering venture INGITEQ, we are committed to addressing these challenges through quality, responsive and cost-effective services, and solutions to meet the needs of our commercial, state/local government, and federal government customers. Watch for our next blog post to learn more about the other two foundational needs, water and education!
