Warm and Fuzzy

Automation has replaced armies of clerical workers  (the new pink collar workers)

Automation has replaced armies of clerical workers
(the new pink collar workers)


We all know the drill ” Thank you for calling Modern Company. If you know your party’s extension please dial it now. For sales dial 101, for service dial 102, for HR dial 103, for accounts receivable dial 104, for shipping dial 105, for scheduling dial 106 —- if you wish to hear the options again press 1″ Usually none of the listed extensions match our needs, so we pick one in desperation only to hear a recorded message “Your call is important to us, please call back when our operators are not busy.”
In today’s lean world, nobody has time to sit at their desk waiting for the phone to ring. If you look at the sea of desks they are mostly unoccupied. Many of the players are simultaneously sitting in teleconferences while answering the daily bombardment of 2 to 300 internal e-mails. This overload is unsustainable and the pendulum will swing back to add new controls. Back in era of large companies, the chain of command was expected to correctly filter the information flow. Sending communication to higher than your boss’s boss was not permitted.
It would be nice to think that an instruction manual would be sufficient to accomplish a simple installation like a computer display screen. In the industrial automation arena, equipment is expected to live 7 years with first rebuild giving another 7 years. When you are matching a new display screen to equipment and controls that are more than 10 years old, a generation miss match occurs. Usually a live local technician with many years experience is needed to resolve the problems, especially if the set-up is complicated by having a defective replacement display screen to start with. This is why we pay a premium to buy industrial display screens because warm and fuzzy help is usually needed to get the repair done. Even good live help, last week we lost three days of production sorting out the replacement of a dead computer display screen.
This is an opportunity that start-up companies can use to grow. Most customers want a warm and fussy feeling and react favorably when they are serviced by knowledgeable people who are not remotely located in a call center. The UX (User Experience) movement is all about having your development staff interact with a representative group of users. As we performed the www.mileagetrakker.com beta test we personally got to know all of the beta testers. Since most people learn by interacting with other people, it was natural for the www.mileagetrakker.com beta testers to acquire the knowledge that they needed. As we scale beyond the beta phase, we continue to test which of the introductory activities can be automated on the website and which training and set-up actions require personal involvement by the sales staff. Even though is is possible to accomplish all of the actions needed to acquire a Mileage Trakker device by interacting with the website, the vast majority will join us due to the activity of the sales staff.
Capture your full mileage deduction

Capture your full mileage deduction


The new battle ground in the marketplace will be establishing the correct balance between efficient computerized automation and warm and fuzzy human support. Monopoly power can force customers to fight with faceless computerized non service, but this jeopardizes the continuation of the company. The pendulum will swing back to creating new employment roles for people.

Jump Frog Jump

Frogs use jumps to escape danger

Frogs use jumps to escape danger


A researcher wanted to investigate how frogs jump. He invented an experiment to determine the contribution of each leg. He needed a baseline, so he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump!” Measuring the distance, he wrote in his journal “Frogs with 4 legs jump 3 feet.” Cutting off the right front leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump.” Measuring the distance he wrote in his journal “Right front leg contributes .5 feet to jump.” Cutting of the left front leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump!” Measuring the distance, he wrote. ” Left leg contributes .8 feet to jump.” Cutting of the right rear leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump.” Measuring the distance he wrote in his journal “Right rear leg contributes 1.7 feet to jump.” Cutting off the left rear leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump!” —- “Jump frog jump!” —- “Jump frog jump!” He wrote in his journal “Frogs with no legs are deaf”
We are all aware that it is easier to make good decisions when you have good data to back them up. Designing the affordable experiments to generate good data is where the difficulty starts to appear. This is especially true in a start up, where a lack of accumulated cash limits the number of pivots that can be done to recover from bad decisions. Even if you invent a timely affordable A/B test to guage your customer’s UX [User Experience], as this joke illustrates, many times convenient conclusions are applied to avoid the work that is actually required to provide what the customer is willing to buy.
A good example is a CAD (computer aided drafting) program. Back in the 90’s we still used drafting boards. By the 90’s this was a money issue related to the user experience of the CAD draftsman. The time, effort and cost of creating CAD drawings could not be recovered by the benefits. Since the downstream benefits of CAD drawings are fairly static, it all boiled down to adjusting the program so that making a drawing on the computer was quicker than using a drawing board. As is true during disruptive time, there were many players who saw the future benefits and wished to own the market. AutoCAD succeeded and displaced most other early players by incorporating effective feedback from thousands of CAD users. A/B testing established the CAD 2D drawing interface that has become dominate.
Ah, but the season changes. AutoCAD 2000 finally had all of the features that a large pool of their users ever wanted. This is not good news for a company with a business model based on selling a new version of their software every three years. Yes, there is other market segments that can take advantage of CAD drafting. Unfortunately cluttering the desktop with additional command icons alienated the existing user base. The A/B testing that enabled AutoCAD to achieve dominance, could not uncover a new look that would entice existing users to buy a new version… A good example of trying to extrapolate a convenient conclusion onto real test data. The actual conclusion is that it is necessary to allow the user to customize his desktop, so that it is possible to retain the look and function and minimized keystrokes of the earlier versions. Only then is the added functionality of new software versions interesting to current users. A/B testing will not invent a desktop look that is acceptable to everyone.
The same process applies to my www.mileagetrakker.com device. Our benchmarking against the competition indicated that UX is the battleground. Most business travelers put 12,000 business miles on a vehicle in a year. This deduction puts $2000 in their pocket provided that they have the correct tax records in the required format. Having spent a large part of Christmas vacation inputting the required mileage logs for many years in a row, my wife and I set out to find a better way. In start-up fashion we did A/B testing during the beta phase to discover whether the user wished to interface using a cell phone, texting, e-mail or a web site.
A/B testing is only one of many testing tools to hear the voice of the customer

A/B testing is only one of many testing tools to hear the voice of the customer

I suspect that Mileage Trakker would have died if we simply taken the results to infer that it was possible to only offer the most popular method. In this mass customization era, the customers expect that they can choose the option that is best for them. Yes it does take more work on our part.
Mass customization is a paradigm shift. The reduction in computing cost has made it possible to offer your customer base some degree of choice. This reality on the ground will filter back into all of the activity and decision making methods within a business. As this example shows, it is important not to limit your chance for success with myopic vision

Global Positioning

Satellites used for glodal positioning circle the globe.

Satellites used for glodal positioning circle the globe.


As little children we are taught the story of Hansel and Gretel who are faced with the challenge of finding their way home in an unfamiliar woods. As we all remember they discovered that pebbles as signs along the way create a map to follow. This lesson went to our hearts and the automobile clubs led the charge to install street and route signs at every fork in the road. Navigation using signs is a workable method as long as it is daytime and the weather cooperates. I can remember my mother turning on the porch light as a beacon to guide out of town visitors to our house.
Safe travel has long been based on line of sight position references

Safe travel has long been based on line of sight
position references


Lighthouses have long been used as beacons to guide sailors safely back to port. During the second world war a concerted effort was made to improve on visual position references. The British development of radar branched into the creation of LORAN.(short for LOng RANge navigation) It was not until the introduction of solid state electronics in the 1970s that marine and military use of LORAN became common. This system used a grid of land radio beacons to calculate the position of ships and planes. Most of the positioning systems still in use today are an evolution of the original LORAN. The position of a GPS receiver is calculated by timing the transmission from 3 or more transmitters in known locations. The measured position accuracy improves if the transmitters are closer or there is fewer obstructions. This is why we primarily use satellite or cell phone based GPS today.
I would like to report that our GPS navigation systems are infallible in their calculation of location. Even though they work most of the time, certain types of obstructions such as parking garages and metal buildings block or reflect the signals. Applications that require continuous guidance, such as the autonomous vehicles that I helped design for warehouse delivery, have additional local beacons to provide sufficiently accurate location. This also overcomes the intentional dithering that the US military adds to the satellite GPS signals. Other useful devices that use GPS locations, such as my www.mileagetrakker.com ,have an embedded workaround that makes the temporary loss of location user invisible. Even though this level of coding is complicated, the user experience is greatly enhanced.
Capture your full mileage deduction

Capture your full mileage deduction


Many of the things that we are trying to achieve are related to our current location. It is not surprising that some of the most successful automation effectively utilizes embedded GPS calculations.