The Supply Chain Information Technology blog

I stumbled across this topic for this week’s blog by accident while browsing the web. Although this is not related to supply chain technology, I thought it was sufficiently high-tech to merit some general interest. I hope you find the topic as interesting as I do.

To begin, let’s review how color photographs are produced by digital cameras. The sensor in a camera cannot directly see color – it can only see intensity of light. When you see a camera advertised as “10 megapixels,” it means there are 10 million light-sensitive photoreceptors on the camera’s “digital film” chip. These photoreceptors record the intensity of the light that falls on them, from zero (black) to high intensity (white). Left to themselves, they produce a black and white image.

But for color, light needs to be broken into primary wavelengths of red, green, and blue (RGB). Combining these three colors in varying intensities creates the full spectrum of color. This is how a digital camera produces a color image. Each photoreceptor in the camera is fitted with an individual red, green, or blue lens that filters the light that falls onto the sensor. 

With this RGB filter in place, the digital information records varying intensities of red, green, and blue light at discrete points in the image. Powerful image-processing algorithms scan this information into the onboard microprocessor’s memory.

On high-end digital cameras, you can change the behavior of the algorithm by setting values for hue, intensity, white balance, contrast, and other variables. The electronics in the camera then go to work to produce a color image from individual pixels of red, green, and blue light intensity information. 

The scientific fact that color can be generated from red, green, and blue light has been known since well before the invention of photography. Since the late 1800s, there have been laboratory experiments in color photography. Technological factors, however, limited the practical majority of photographic images to black and white up until the late 1930s (and it was not until the 1960s that color came to the mass market, as immortalized by the Simon and Garfunkel song “Kodachrome”). 

Here’s the really interesting part: On my web search, I found that there was one early photographer who developed an elegant approach to color photography. He was a Russian named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. He was familiar with theories that one could create a color image by taking successive black and white images through red, green, and blue filters.

He also built a projector that would allow him to show audiences color images projected on a screen. He was successful enough that the Tsar commissioned him to go on a photographic expedition to document the Russian Empire. These trips occurred from 1905–1915. 

The expedition produced thousands of glass plate negatives. These could be printed and displayed as conventional black and white images for publication and exhibition. However, the projection apparatus needed for producing the color images limited the practical extent to which the images could be published in full color.

Then came the Russian Revolution, which was a disaster for Prokudin-Gorskii and all other friends of the Tsar. He fled Russia. His collection of glass plate negatives ultimately wound up in the archives of the US Library of Congress, where they sat in obscurity.

With the advent of digital photography, a curator in the Library of Congress realized that the Prokudin-Gorskii photographs could be displayed in a manner never before possible. In 2004, the Library of Congress commissioned a restoration project. Each set of negatives was scanned into a computer, aligned, and color-adjusted in exactly the same manner as an image is produced within a digital camera.

Tags: digital, photography, russia

The recent big news in supply chain information technology is the return of Walmart to industry leadership in retail RFID deployment. An article in the Wall Street Journal reports that Walmart is deploying RFID tags for individual clothing items at its US stores. Read the full story here.

To give you an idea of the ROI that these types of projects could see, I would like to share with you some facts from a couple of articles that I have written over the past few years. In 2006, for example, the Mitsukoshi department store in Japan published the results of item-level tagging of high-end women’s shoes. The RFID tags allowed associates to accurately and quickly find the customer’s size (previously a problem in the stockroom), which resulted in a 10% increase in sales due to more accurate inventory data. (Read more in this IndustryWeek RFID Strategy Newsletter article.)

Tags: rfid, inventory management

In theory the problem of inter-application communication is simple; one merely establishes a standard protocol (TCP/IP, XML, etc.) and then codes or configures an application to use that protocol. 

Tags: supply chain applications, integrating, upgrading, upgrades, compliance, security

It’s no secret that Tompkins Associates is a proponent of warehouse control systems. In fact, we have our own WCS that we provide to our integration clients: Tompkins Warehouse Control System.

I bring this up, because a recent client meeting reminded me of how a WCS can open up visibility into warehouse operations. This particular client is using our WCS to implement a multi-phase material handling equipment upgrade. The warehouse management systems' (WMS) interface to the WCS are expected to remain fixed while the MHE changes.

During the meeting, we finished the interface review and moved into a discussion of our operational data screens. As I finished a review of our standard screens, I asked the client team for input on any custom screens or reports that they might need to help them manage the DC. After a period of silence, they answered, "We will have to get back to you on that, since our current controls don’t provide us any data!"

It was a light-bulb-over-the-head, paradigm-shifting moment. Our client team realized that they now had the opportunity to "know what they didn’t know" (i.e., get visibility into productivity and throughput data to help them identify trouble spots and optimize their warehousing and distribution operations).

A WCS provides two important advantages over a traditional WMS/MHE controls integration:

The first advantage is that it hides the complexity of MHE interface details from the WMS. In essence, the WCS provides a uniform interface of data items to the WMS while dealing with the physical interface to the MHE. This was the feature that drove our client to select a WCS for their multi-phase warehouse upgrade program.

The second advantage of a WCS is that it provides real-time data to allow users to manage their MHE and warehouse operations. Although this feature can be provided by traditional controls, it is often overlooked. This operational data visibility is a powerful advantage to any organization (like our client in the story above) that has been struggling with an older low-to-zero information MHE controls system.

Tompkins has plenty of good company in regards to touting the advantage of using warehouse control systems in modern DCs. I recently came across an article that shows how Ikea uses a WCS to support uniform practices across its network of DCs. The article, linked here (http://logisticsviewpoints.com/2009/09/03/ikea-overcomes-warehouse-control-systems-islands-of-automation/), is worth reading for a complementary perspective on the topic.

The advantages of a WCS feed into a topic that is the essence of this blog: the topic of supply chain visibility. Any DC is an important link in the data chain that comprises supply chain visibility (or is in fact the origination point of the supply chain).

Warehouse Control Systems are an important tool not only to manage the DC, but to link the data within the DC to the overall supply-chain IT infrastructure. A well-implemented WCS begins supply chain visibility right in your own DC.

-- Paul

Tags: wms, mhe, integration

After working as a supply chain IT professional for many years, sometimes people start considering you an expert in certain areas. So, as it happens, whenever an RFID consulting opportunity comes our way at Tompkins Associates, heads usually turn in my direction.

As the resident RFID "expert," I recently spoke with Maida Napolitano at Logistics Management Magazine. She was working on the article, which ran in their February issue, Warehouse and Distribution Centers: RFID Revisited.

Her article focuses on the ROI of RFID, and she notes four key benefits that RFID-enabled warehouses and DCs can achieve within the first 12 months of deployment. They are:

Eliminate shipping and receiving errors,

Improve productivity,

Establish traceability, and

Achieve inventory control and accuracy.

RFID is not going away any time soon. So, if you want to get some ideas about the advantages of RFID and learn more about what Wal-mart is doing with their RFID initiatives, check out this article, or post comments and questions right here on our blog. I would like to hear your thoughts.

--Paul

Tags: distribution centers

The recent roll-out of Microsoft Windows 7, Apple OS-X "Snow Leopard," and three major Linux releases (Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE) within two months of each other gave me an opportunity to step back and assess the state of personal-computer technology.

We have all become so accustomed to rapid changes in technology that I have not seen much written about a quite remarkable development; namely, that 64-bit operating systems have become a normal consumer-level product.

Each of the operating systems released in the past few months have a 64-bit version that can be installed as an option or, in the case of new hardware, comes as the default installation.

In addition, with the introduction of Windows 7 Professional and its "Windows XP Mode," the formerly business-class technology of virtualization has gone mainstream for the consumer.

I’ll use this week’s blog entry to explore the implications of these developments for the near future of the PC market.

For some perspective, I’ll take you back to the first time I encountered a 64-bit machine. The year was 1986 and I was working on computational aerodynamics at Grumman Aerospace.

We were given classroom training on how to program for the Cray supercomputer, which used a custom version of Unix as its operating system. The machine had a 2GB disk pack (a mind-boggling amount of storage back then) which was the size of two four-drawer vertical file cabinets stacked next to each other.

Now, of course, you can hang 2GB of storage off your keychain in a USB stick. But until quite recently, 64-bit machines were still the province of scientific research labs and other specialized applications, just as it was in the heyday of the Cray supercomputer.

The term "64-bit" refers to the size of the data registers and communications bus within the computer hardware. The advantage of 64-bit computing is in moving and processing large amounts of data efficiently within the computer. For most users this boils down to the simple concept of "much more memory."

Depending on the OS used, most older 32-bit machines can handle no more than 2GB or 3GB of RAM. On 64-bit machines the practical limit is your ability to pay for more memory – up to 64GB of memory can be easily supported by the current CPU and OS versions, with the theoretical limit set at 16 exabytes (two orders of magnitude more than terabytes).

For a sense of the scale of those numbers, consider that some studies cited on Wikipedia show that the entire Internet moves five to eight exabytes of information per month. So we are talking quite literally about consumer desktop PC operating systems with more theoretical RAM capacity than the total data-usage of the planet.

Clearly no home-user currently "needs" more than 3GB of RAM for even the most intensive video-editing or HD Blu-ray video processing.

So the natural question is, how will this extra hardware capacity be used? Because we know that if 64GB of RAM becomes inexpensive in the near future, someone will figure out a way to use it.

As it happens, the commercial server market has been using 64-bit operating systems and large amounts of RAM for several years. The servers deployed in these configurations support traditional "supercomputer" uses such as scientific computing and Hollywood special-effects video rendering, but the dominant application over the past several years has been virtual machines.

In this application, one physical server runs software that makes it appear to be several independent "virtual" servers (up to ten or more virtual machines on one physical machine). Each virtual server has its own OS and set of applications, which can be different from each other virtual server. The technology is used to reduce the hardware, energy, and administrative costs within an IT datacenter.

As mentioned above, Windows 7 Pro brings this technology to the home user who wants to run older Windows XP applications on a new Windows 7 computer. For example, my son plays a popular online game that has never worked well with Vista. Using Windows 7 Pro, I can set up a virtual Windows XP session for him to use.

The "Windows XP Mode" is actually a complete virtual machine running an independent copy of Windows XP. This development brings technology that was once the province of IT specialists and Linux hobbyists into the mainstream for the benefit, in this example, of peace between a 12-year-old and his XP-hating dad.

Even under that scenario, current new-model PCs have more processing power and RAM than even the most demanding consumer needs.

The commercial experience with virtualization points toward the possible end-user applications of all this excess hardware capacity. The "roadmap" for players such as Microsoft and Google is to use the new capabilities of 64-bit PCs to deliver robust, secure online applications within virtual machines hosted by a user’s own PC.

The first company to make this explicit was Google. In their roadmap for their Chrome OS, they describe a platform that will allow them to push services (such as Google Office) as downloads over the web in a much more robust and high-performance way than is currently possible with current web-browser technology. In fact, the plan is for the Chrome "browser" to be a set of virtual-machine environments that coincidentally look like a web page.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft has announced a "cloud computing" initiative named Azure. Currently aimed at businesses, you can be sure that Windows 7 factors heavily into the as-yet-unannounced desktop roadmap for Azure.

So in looking at the trends in computing, I can predict that the near future for desktop PCs will include end-user services that build on virtualization as a foundation, whether this is apparent to the user or not.

In a future blog posting, I’ll explore ways this might play out in the supply chain technology computing space.

Until then, tell us what benefits you have found by using a 64-bit operating system.

Paul Faber

Tags: pc technology