Lowest Bidders Don’t Have To Be
Losers
After reading this issue of MHM, you’ll be impressed with how well some
public-sector entities are investing our tax dollars in material handling
technology. But as I read some of the news reports that cross my desk and
computer screen lately, taxpayers might have reason for concern about
government spending on information systems — at least at the local level.
According to a recent Computerworld story, Los Angeles city government has been
struggling with the implemetation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP)
program because employees are populating its fields with bad data. The article
cites inadequate end-user training and poor help desk support, resulting in
billing problems, late payments to suppliers and inventory shortages. In one
case, warehouse workers in the General Services Department priced police
citation books at $1,649 apiece when they entered the inventory data into the
new system. They should have keyed in $16.49.
Would better training have made a difference? Would a help
desk have helped?
“Public-sector ERP projects can be problematic because
government agencies often are working on tight budgets and have to accept the
lowest bids on system implementation contracts,” Computerworld quoted Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst at Enterprise
Applications Consulting, Daly City, California.
Well, duh!
Imagine! Having to work under a tight budget and then
degrading themselves to deal with low-bid vendors. The shame.
Welcome to the real world. Private industry has been working
under these conditions for years, and there are plenty of successful material
handling logistics projects around to prove that a little discipline goes a
long way in linking plant and warehouse information flows to the enterprise.
Maybe the U.S. Department of Commerce should partner with information system
vendors to show local governments how an industrial information infrastructure
should run.
Ridiculous? The DOC is already involved in such an effort,
only its focus is on “the office of the future.” The National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) calls its baby the Smart Space
Laboratory. It’s a simulated work environment where software and hardware
are blended “to give people unprecedented levels of access to computers,”
according to the NIST newsletter, TechBeat. The Smart Space Laboratory is
working on pervasive computing, defined as the convergence of computers,
wireless devices and sensors that “see” and “hear.” The
Internet provides the communications channel.
The technology involved includes voice recognition as
applied to automatic transcriptions, voice pattern identification and data
security systems. This technology may be new to the office, but some of it has
been used in the warehouse for years in picking applications.
Government-funded researchers should stop using binoculars
to look into the distance for high-tech solutions and start sharing the
microscopes that private-sector logisticians have been using to improve their
material and data flows.
The Office of the Future would become a reality a lot sooner
if it were connected to today’s state-of-the-art factory or distribution
center. The researchers might even learn a few things about succeeding on a
tight budget and working with the lowest bidders.
John Q. Taxpayer will buy that.
Tom Andel
chief editor
tandel@penton.com
