How people speak is as important as the words they say when it comes to sentiment analysis. "The human voice is made of many repeating patterns," said Amir Liberman, CEO of Nemesysco. "Everything that attracts your attention will generate a slight disturbance in these patterns. We look carefully at this voice chart, and we identify disturbances."
Several Miami-based restaurants and bars are employing a radio frequency identification solution that identifies and weighs liquor bottles, and then transmits that information to a server where it can be linked to point-of-sale (POS) data. In this way, management can know how much of each type of liquor is being poured, how customers are then being charged at the register, and when any discrepancies might occur, such as an over- or under-pour, a missing bottle or unbilled pours.
Why have companies been so slow to apply lean principles and techniques to service processes such as finance, human resources, accounting, health care, and customer service? One reason is that the waste and inefficiency that can interfere with services are rarely obvious.
With all the attention recently being paid to same-day deliveries by retailers including eBay, Walmart, Macy's, Nordstrom and tons of others, here's an interesting stat"”and a delicious contradiction"”from Amazon, the largest and earliest same-day retail deliverer: consumers consider the service, purchase an item, then don't opt to use same-day service.
Bereket Döner, one of Turkey's largest producers of frozen and ready-to-serve meat products, is employing radio frequency identification to track its goods as they are loaded onto pallets, weighed and shipped to customers.
In 1948 a supermarket executive came to the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia with a request. He wanted a technology that could encode information about his products. Two graduate students, Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland, took up the challenge. Woodland became obsessed and dropped out of school to concentrate on it.
In discussing how the business model at Canadian National Railway has changed over the last 10 years or so, Claude Mongeau, CEO at CN, recognized the importance of the supply chain.
While more than 75 percent of suppliers are confident in their ability to meet their customers' needs in 2013, one-third of respondents to ASQ's 2013 Manufacturing Outlook Survey say they anticipate a problem with a supplier next year, resulting in a shortage of parts or services.
Nearly two-thirds of businesses (61 percent) surveyed in North America and Europe recognize that the post-holiday period represents the most challenging time of the year due to the high numbers of returns, according to an Intermec study. Yet despite this, more than half (52 percent) of distribution center managers admit they don't have the appropriate processes and tools in place to determine if returned goods should be discarded, returned to vendor or moved quickly back into inventory.
