Tag: sensors

OM in the News: The Intelligent Tire and “Last Mile” Delivery

Alongside the tire jack and the air pump, consider the algorithm as a tool for fixing flats, writes The Wall Street Journal (June 17, 2021). Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Bridgestone are rolling out new intelligent tire features that use sensors and artificial intelligence for vehicles delivering packages from e-commerce sites.

The technology is geared toward vehicles that specialize in last-mile delivery, which refers to the final step in getting packages from a distribution center to the customer. The market for last-mile delivery has picked up as online shopping has soared during the coronavirus pandemic. The volume of parcels is expected to grow to 200 billion in 2025, up from an estimated 100 billion in 2019,

tire

Goodyear’s new technology is called SightLine and includes a sensor and proprietary machine-learning algorithms that can predict flat tires or other issues days ahead of time, by measuring tire wear, pressure, road-surface conditions and many other factors. Sightline’s sensor tracks dozens of measurements such as tire wear, inflation and road-surface conditions and a battery that detects temperature, pressure, acceleration and vibration.

The surge of last-mile deliveries means that a lot of vehicles are on the road, stopping and going, hitting curbs, causing damage to the tires, causing breakdowns and congestion. Last-mile delivery vehicles can go through four sets of tires a year, which is highly inefficient from a cost and sustainability perspective.

Vehicles using Goodyear’s intelligent tires can shorten the stopping distance lost by wear and tear on a tire by about 30%. Helping detect tire-related problems before they happen can lead to fewer breakdowns, less traffic congestion and increased safety for last-mile delivery drivers. Tire manufacturers are also investing more heavily in the field of telematics, which refers to the use of technology to collect and monitor data relating to a vehicle or parts of a vehicle.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How can this tire impact the logistics of a firm?
  2. Why is the “last mile” so important in the supply chain?

OM in the News: Overcoming Supply Chain Disruptions With Sensors

Supply chains and logistics have seen massive disruptions as a result of COVID-19, creating new challenges for retail and manufacturing operations worldwide. Material Handling and Logistics (Nov. 12, 2020) identifies how sensors can be used to improve and modernize logistics to shore up global supply chain infrastructures.

There are 4 critical points in the logistics process – point of origin, warehousing, transit, and destination – each with a unique set of challenges that impact the efficiency of supply chains, sometimes even leading to complete breakdowns. Things that go wrong in the logistics process include pilfering, asset misplacement, and physical damage due to improper storage conditions and unexpected events.

These challenges will be exacerbated as vaccines become available for COVID-19. Ensuring the right goods are transported in the right quantities, under the right conditions, and delivered to the right place at the right time, will allow society to remain functional to fight the pandemic.

Fortunately, sensors can alert companies to these problems and help them address these issues, sometimes even before they become a problem. IoT sensing solutions are the most promising, as they enhance data visibility and transparency across the entire process and facilitate planning, optimizing, and uncovering other invisible insights.

They can be used to monitor environmental conditions, prevent misplacement, identify damages, avoid accidents, ensure compliance, track location, and reveal real-time conditions. Even without network connections, sensors can still reveal the logistics history of a process, helping to identify events that might have compromised goods. Today, sensing solutions are fragmented, with no standardized solutions available to span the entire logistics journey. Nonetheless, sensors play a critical role in enabling information transparency to facilitate planning, optimization, and risk management in the supply chain.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What is IoT and why is it an important OM tool?
  2. What are the complications faced in bringing COVID-19 vaccines to consumers?

OM in the News and Video Tip: FedEx Recruits Robots

Robotic arms manufactured by Yaskawa America

Sue, Randall, Colin and Bobby are 4 of the most reliable FedEx workers in Memphis. Each clocks 8 hours a day, sorting 1,300 packages an hour. They almost never take breaks, as they are actually 260-pound industrial robot arms.

They work only about half as fast as skilled humans, but they are quickly becoming an important part of the chain that keeps packages flowing. These robots, getting both “eyes” and “brains” that allow them to sense and respond, typify an important and growing trend in automation, writes The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 8-9, 2020). They have cameras which perceive visible light and sensors to perceive depth, and their “brains” are built with machine-learning AI. This gives them a level of adaptability not before seen. (There is an excellent 6 min. video that opens this WSJ article).

But the robots are not about to steal all the jobs in these industries. For now, they’re mostly filling vacancies created by surging demand. The explosion of e-commerce means an explosion in the volume of packages shipped to homes. Some 87 billion parcels were shipped worldwide in 2018—that’s 40 a year to every person in the U.S.—and this volume will more than double by 2025.

The need for social distancing within warehouses means robots can play a role in helping workers do their jobs without being directly adjacent to one another. And logistics companies are still finding it hard to hire people fast enough. (FedEx’s air hub in Memphis currently has 500 job openings).  FedEx estimates one human could tend up to 8 robots.

The overwhelming majority of industrial robot arms in the world are still the “dumb” kind: They repeat the same action over and over again—for example welding the same parts together repeatedly on an auto production line. The holy grail of picking technology—a robot that can handle the same variety as a human—will remain out of reach for a long time, in the same way we have yet to create an autonomous vehicle that can handle the same variety of road situations a human can.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is it so hard for robots to replace warehouse workers?
  2. Why are firms like FedEx more driven to automate?

OM in the News: A Safe Return to Manufacturing Productivity

COVID-19 is changing everything in manufacturing. Companies face a long journey to the “next normal,” one that will likely have far-reaching financial and operational implications, writes Industry Week (July 14, 2020). Immediate priorities include creating a safe work environment for production employees. Missteps could invoke legal or regulatory actions, something all companies want to avoid. As many manufacturers enter the Recover phase of COVID-19, one that is marked by restarting production at plants in regions that have been impacted differently by virus outbreaks, workforce safety becomes a critical priority. The restart/ramp-up should generate considerations across the work itself, the workforce, and the workplace.

Work: How will new physical distancing constraints and supply/demand variability be incorporated into operations? Are there opportunities to remove humans from processes through automation and/or robotics?

Workforce: How will workers “feel” safe and come back to work willingly? What new policies and procedures are required to protect employees, reduce risk of spread (e.g. personal protective equipment (PPE), break room policies)?

Workplace: What physical/operational changes are necessary to meet health and safety requirements? What technologies and solutions could create a safer work environment in plants and facilities?

A holistic approach toward the recovery phase should include solutions that address all three of these areas. It will likely blend strategy and process changes with advanced technologies, which can hold the key to a robust recovery for manufacturers. Some of the smart factory technologies that many manufacturers have already been piloting, such as data analytics–71% in a recent study, sensors–54% and wearables–29%, could dramatically accelerate the pathway to recovery.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What other complications will operations managers face when reopening factories or service facilities?
  2. What role can sensors play?

OM in the News: Wearable Technology is Changing Ergonomics

“The future of industrial ergonomics isn’t a person with a clipboard checking workers’ posture,” writes The Wall Street Journal (March 6, 2020). Warehouse operators and manufacturers are now testing wearable technology intended to stave off injuries from repetitive tasks like lifting boxes that can exact a significant toll on workers’ bodies over time. Overexertion in lifting or lowering was one of the most common events leading to occupational injuries.

Companies including Walmart and Toyota are experimenting with sensors that identify when workers engage in risky movements—say, bending their backs without squatting—and prompt them to change their form in real time. The devices also collect data that employers can use to assess how new equipment, tasks or changes in production volume affect worker safety. “It’s not about productivity or pick rates or any of that,” says an Australian exec. “It’s about reducing the chance of people getting hurt.”

Kinetic is a startup whose pager-like sensors clip on to workers’ belts to measure their body mechanics. Document-storage company Iron Mountain began using Kinetic’s devices 3 years ago to reduce at-risk postures that contribute to sprains and strains among warehouse staff and drivers who collect paper for shredding or storage. The technology takes the motion of the wearer’s hip and uses artificial intelligence and algorithms to reconstruct what that person’s body must have done to make it move that way, then determines whether the motion is high risk. Iron Mountain says it has experienced a 45% reduction in at-risk postures with the devise.

Direct observation, which we discuss in Chapter 10,  isn’t as precise because it can cause people to alter their movements.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is ergonomics so important in many jobs?
  2. Some firms are also testing “exoskeletons,” which we have blogged on recently. How do these exosuits differ from the sensor approach?

OM in the News: Molecular Sensors Revolutionize Quality Control

A chocolate bar undergoing testing with SCiO technology to detect fake or mislabeled ingredients
A chocolate bar undergoing testing with SCiO technology to detect fake or mislabeled ingredients

The recent food outbreaks of norovirus at Chipotle Mexican Grill are a reminder that one in six people in the U.S. experience food poisoning every year, and 128,000 are hospitalized for it. Add to that all the other hazards in our food—carcinogens, pesticides, mislabeling of everything from seafood to meatballs—and you realize that in the U.S., the price of cheap and bountiful food is an array of unsavory compromises. “But what if you could know exactly what you’re putting in your mouth, down to the last bite? What if we all had the ability to inspect our food in a way previously accessible only to chemists with costly laboratories”, asks The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 14, 2015)?

The $250 Nima from 6SensorLabs is an organic-chemistry lab small enough to carry in your pocket, and able detecting gluten in foods at minuscule concentrations, as little as 20 parts per million. In the near future, Nima will recognize all manner of proteins—including ones that would allow it to recognize bacterial contaminants such as E. coli and salmonella. Nima is typical of a new breed of sensors that are cheap and fast enough to add more layers of inspection to our food system, for suppliers, restaurants and even individual consumers.

Another such technology, by Safe Catch, offers the world’s lowest mercury-contaminated canned tuna fish. This process allows Safe Catch to inspect every single fish as soon as it comes off the boat, rather than sampling just a small percentage of them. Then there is SCiO from Consumer Physics of Israel, which can identify substances by measuring the spectrum of light they reflect. Its sensor has the advantage of being so small—it is basically a camera technology—that it could be incorporated directly into cellphones. These and similar electronic products will almost certainly create whole new applications, markets and billion-dollar businesses.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why are these new sensors so important to operations managers?
  2. What other applications can you envisage for such products?

 

 

OM in the News: Sensors and Sustainability–A New Look at Autos

google carCheap, powerful, microscopic sensors are ubiquitously entering the $2 trillion automotive industry, reports Diamandis.com (Sept. 21, 2015). It’s a big, inefficient, wasteful and dangerous industry. Here’s how the annual numbers stack up for the U.S.:

  • 33,000 lives are lost and a million injuries.
  • $230 billion of accident cost in the U.S. –about 2-3% of GDP.
  • 50 billion hours (or 1 trillion dollars) of people’s time–around 8% of GDP.
  • 50 billion gallons of imported gasoline (12-15% of the USA’s CO2 emissions).

Autonomous cars appear to be coming fast. Google is leading the way, but Apple, Tesla, Uber and every major car company is following. Today, Google’s self-driving cars have driven far more than 1.5 million miles, safely and fully autonomously. Google’s car are made possible because of their suite of sensors. One in particular is a 64-beam Velodyne LIDAR sensor (Laser Imaging Radar) that, combined with cameras, sonar and GPS, is collecting and analyzing 750 Mb of data per second. The car knows everything that’s happening within 100 meters of the sensor.

The impact: In 20 years there will be more than 54 million autonomous cars on the road, meaning:

  • Saved Lives: Autonomous cars don’t drive drunk, don’t text and don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
  • Reclaiming Land: You can fit 8 times more autonomous cars on our roads. Today, in the U.S. we devote over 10% of the urban land to parking spaces and to our paved highways and roads.
  • Saved Energy: Today we give close to 25% of all of our energy to personal transportation, and 25% of our greenhouse gases are going to the car. If cars don’t crash, you don’t need a 5,000-lb SUV driving around a 100-lb passenger.
  • Saved Money/Higher Productivity: Trading out 4,000-lb. cars for lighter electric cars that don’t crash will save 90% on a person’s automotive transportation bill–plus regain 1- 2 hours of daily productivity, reclaiming hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. economy.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. In what other ways are sensors revolutionizing operations management?
  2. What are the downsides of autonomous cars?