Guys you have to read this! It really made me laugh.
For those of you who insist on dwelling on supply chain management to the detriment of your social life, one fascinating idea in that field comes from Stephen Ho, who just got his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ho calls his idea, which will only work once RFID is on every product, "location-relaxed storage." It's a funny euphemism in the tradition of calling a bald person follically challenged.
Basically it means that instead of organizing a warehouse by putting items in their carefully defined proper places, RFID will make it more efficient to just throw everything everywhere. It's the total chaos warehouse.
How can that possibly work better? Well, picture an Amazon.com warehouse. A worker is looking at an order for one copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beagles and one copy of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Chances are that the spot for beagle books is far away from the spot for T.S. Eliot books. The worker has to zoom around the warehouse to fill the order.
Now let's say every book has an RFID tag. Whenever a truckload of books arrives at the warehouse, instead of sorting them into defined slots, workers just shove them anywhere there's an empty space. Copies of Idiot's Guide to Beagles and Prufrock are scattered all around the building.
RFID readers placed around the warehouse constantly ping all the RFID tags to learn what books are where. The readers send that data to the warehouse's central computer. Then a worker filling an order picks up a wireless handheld computer and uses it to ask the central computer where he can find the nearest copy of each book.
Because the books are scattered around the warehouse, one of each is likely to be nearby, making the worker more efficient — he might just have to walk a few steps to get both books. Ho mathematically proved that the chances are greater that both books would be closer when using this chaotic, location-relaxed storage system, vs. using an organized warehouse.
Of course, if the electricity goes out, the warehouse is hosed.
Though Ashton didn't say so, there might be some contradictory elements to these RFID concepts.
If it's true that in an RFID world it's more efficient to fling everything around a warehouse than to use space as an organizing principle, would that also apply to your home? It might be better to let everything in your house go to chaos, then use an RFID reader to find what you're looking for.
I would love to try this ridiculous system out at home one day in the future, wouldn't you?
I also wandered if this concept could apply to your computer one day. No need to save things in the correct folders, just shove things where ever you want, much more efficient.
Taken from: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2004-10-05-maney_x.htm
2 comments:
Alright shorty?
Ok, you've used this blog to catalogue thoughts about the current project - as most have done, right? So it's tricky to ascertain exactly what might make a good focus for your dissertation. I've noticed your interest in the term 'Pooterism' and the user based websites such as youtube. It would make for a interesting focus for the essay - the end user spreading themselves out over the web via these sites, noting down their thoughts and feeling in text, pictures and video. In the future, I suppose you could capture a really clear picture of a person by all the information they've stored out there on the web. What if we all started blogging as soon as we learned to type and use a computer? Our entire lives would be backed up digitally for all to see, on the internet, forever.
I'm pretty sure Sherry Turkle might make a for a good starting point on an issue such as this one.
Look her up on wikipedia. She generally talks about people's relationships with technology.
Oddly, that warehouse idea does sound more efficiant, although I think it would be better to still have some organization, maybe lot's of piles of a particulkar book, so the worker will still have the choice of the nearest. I don't think it could work on a computer though, because if your in a hurry you can always use the search option.
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