Right around the time my oldest child started bringing home spelling tests every week, I traveled from my home in the US to Prague for a series of meetings.  There, I joined a team made up of citizens from seven different countries, each with their own native language.  Luckily for me, (perhaps because of me, likely the only monolingual participant in the room), we chose English as the common language.  It was during this trip that I fully realized, English is terrible.

I've been giving a lot of thought recently to the way software designers, when creating a human-facing application, try to discern the human's intent.

There is a slippery slope when a software application goes from requiring explicit requests to assuming intentions based on actions or conditions.  The results can produce consequences that the human neither comprehended nor desired.

Earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to discuss workforce management with many companies.  Specifically, how were these enterprises measuring their hands-on workforce, such as warehouse, delivery, retail and even call center employees?

While many variations exist, three attributes recurred frequently enough such that I now consider them the central pillars of an effective hands-on workforce.  As with any core principle, a company who values these attributes will measure, encourage, and continually strive to improve in these areas.

Simply put, they are: safety, accuracy and efficiency.

A significant aspect of the LogistiVIEW solution is enabling workforce excellence.  The remainder of this post will examine each of these three pillars in more detail.

​We in the tech industry love our buzzwords.  We put them through hype cycles and go all-in to gain serious mindshare.
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In this entry, we will examine synergies among the three most prominent technology buzzwords today, and introduce a new one that is right up in our wheelhouse.

Recently, we enumerated the attributes we use when qualifying VIEW devices in pursuit of the Effortless Human Interface.  Our new partner Vuzix rose to the occasion with the M300.

A previous entry in this blog introduced the Effortless Human Interface™.  This concept crystallizes our commitment to freeing productive hands from the burdens of cumbersome input devices.

As the marketplace grows with new entries in the "wearables" category, we at LogistiVIEW submit the following checklist.  We use it to determine which VIEW devices are truly capable of implementing our notion of an Effortless Human Interface.

Every company has its own set of core values.  Policies and practices may change over time, but the core values should remain constant.

At LogistiVIEW, one of our core values is this:  We hate "users."  ​

Task execution computer systems, such as Warehouse Management Systems, can be broken down into several main functions:

1. Information storage. What are the unique pieces of information maintained by this system and no others? In the case of WMS, examples include the bin-level location of all inventory in the warehouse, and the tracking of which employee moved it along the way.
2. Integration. The system needs information from external systems to perform its tasks, Notification of task progress and completion must be communicated back out.
3. Decision making. There are many decisions that the system can make better than any human.  Why? The system has instant recall of much more information, and an ability to repeat complex algorithms flawlessly regardless of how much sleep it got the night before. Deciding which bin has the best product to fulfill an order, or which worker is the best to fetch it, is truly best left to the software.
4. Task execution. Here the system meets the human operators to actually get the job done. Instructions are given to the operators, and completion progress is confirmed back to the system. This is our focus at LogistiVIEW.

I have been privileged to work directly with some of the founders and leaders of the Supply Chain Execution (SCE) software industry.
 
As we are now taking the message of logistiVIEW out to the world, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the late Gene Gagnon, who founded Gagnon & Associates in 1960.  He built an engineering consulting practice focused on optimizing labor using engineered standards.  Gene combined sound engineering principles with the emerging capabilities of the PC revolution to build an innovative solution for distribution operations.  I met Gene in 1998, when McHugh Software International (later, RedPrairie and now part of JDA) purchased Gagnon & Associates.  I assumed the responsibility for Gagnon’s software development, and my eyes were soon opened to the brilliance of this offering.  The value proposition was, and still is, the combination of labor management software and engineered standards, providing significant labor savings to the customers.