Category Archives: Technology

They Terk Er Jerbs!


 

Now that the age of the robots are here (and this can’t be denied as the robots are in Walmart now [Source: Reuters]), will you be the next to join Darryl Weathers’ crew in screaming that they took your job?

Or will you welcome their entry into the workforce and their willingness to do the work you don’t want to do and take the opportunity to (learn to) do something better and more interesting and, frankly, more intelligent.

Face it. You don’t want to check inventory. It’s boring. You don’t want to apply the same rivet all day on the production line. It’s boring. And you certainly don’t want to harvest [as evidenced by the fact that most farms can’t find enough domestic workers during harvest season to do the same boring task minute after minute, hour after hour, and day after day during harvest season].

But you’re sometimes willing to actually stock shelves — organizing a display can be mildly creative, and you would probably rather help someone find a product and have some form of personal interaction than scan shelves for products people may or may not want. You’re probably also more willing to do quality testing on the outputs of the production line than construction, at least that’s verification of quality and a bit of creative destruction, and you’d probably be even more willing to review design aspects and even assist in prototype development if the company gave you a bit of training. Etc.

Robots will take jobs, but the jobs these artificially intelligent machines take are not always the interesting jobs, and there are jobs they can’t take. They are not truly intelligent, and as a result they can’t truly anticipate what we will want, they can’t create new works of art without guidance, and they can’t always read our mood and feelings, especially if we are not being forthcoming about it. Yes they can predict based on trends and be right a lot, but this means they can also be spectacularly wrong. And when it comes to quality, they can’t test for anything they haven’t been programmed to test for. So if a product had a major usability design flaw, as long as it passed the material stress tests, the robot would never know.

There may come a day when they are almost as good at us at design, creative, and social jobs, but that’s still a ways off. For now, we can at least be content in the fact that while they take some jobs, they can’t take all aspects of those jobs and we can create new job definitions that expand upon what they can’t do. We will have to keep learning, and truly work smarter, but screaming They Terk Er Jerbs won’t get us anywhere (as it hasn’t since the dawn of the industrial revolution). So, for now we can take solace in the fact that we can create a two-tier society: us, and them, and relegate them to the lower tier, as long as we don’t grant them citizenship! (Even pretending to is too much!)

And use them, and advanced software, to do our jobs better! Even in Procurement. How? Stay tuned.

None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us! Unless, Of Course, You Include AI!

the doctor sees a lot of unsolicited pitches hit his inbox each and every day. Since SI does not cover press releases (since he just does not give a damn about your meaningless marketing sound-bites which do little to nothing to advanced education and technology) he ignores most of them. But this week he saw one of the most ridiculous headlines ever:

Can AI Harness the World’s 2 Billion Social Media Influencers?

Ignoring the fact that that the headline is factually incorrect (there are 2 Billion Users, NOT Influencers), this is one of the dumbest questions ever posed and anyone who understood anything about the state of AI today would not even want to ask it!

Generally, if you are going to train AI, you want to train AI on expertise. And where’s the last space you’d expect to find expertise? That’s right! Social Media.

But that’s just the tip of the why-you-should-not-do-this iceberg! If you include everyone, you not only include everyone of above average intelligence, but everyone of below average intelligence by very definition. So while you will have a few geniuses, you will also have morons, imbeciles, and possibly even idiots (as per the original Binet IQ scale). Do you really want them training your AI?

Moreover, what do people share on Social Media? Their most brilliant ideas? Well developed arguments? Philosophical contributions? Wisdom? Profound insights? Or pictures. Comments on politics. Viewpoints on pop culture. Their thoughts of the moment. Complaints. Rants. Digs. Manifestos. Insults. Self Praise. And so on. And most of it in blurbs, not sentences, and definitely not paragraphs. And in addition to the onslaught of bad grammar, the rate of spelling errors is atrocious.

Is this what you want to train an AI on? Really? You really want an AI that is going to make decisions like an angry dumb, self-obsessed, neurotic, troll with self-esteem issues making your decisions? And that’s likely a best-case scenario.

the doctor doesn’t know about you, but if he’s going to trust an AI, he wants that AI trained by experts for specific tasks, with performance analyzed and tweaked by other experts, since, as we know, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, since no algorithm is intelligent, no matter how advanced, and what we really have are advanced automated reasoning algorithms. But if those algorithms were trained by the impaired, those algorithms are the last algorithms he would ever want to use. And those algorithms should NOT be on your list either.

Why Bother Classifying Spend? 3 Ways Spend Analysis Will Improve Your Life … Part II

Today’s guest post is from Brian Seipel, Spend Analysis lead at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations gain a clear view of their spend data to derive actionable budget optimization strategies.

Yesterday we began our tale of two VARs that have a lot in common. Both serve the same North East region, both offer stellar customer service, and so far the relationship has been good on all sides. Each of your offices comes away satisfied after reviewing their VAR’s track record. But, as we started to discuss yesterday, that’s not all there is to the story. Today we discuss the next two ways spend analytics can change your life … for the better.

Improve Efficiencies

Beyond hard dollar savings, companies stand to save money by building a leaner, more efficient Procurement department. From the benefit described above, we can already see how our total vendor pool will be reduced through consolidation, and fewer vendors to manage means less time devoted to the procurement process. However, we will also learn more about our vendor landscape through the analysis.

Continuing the example above, let’s consider those two VARs a bit more closely. All else equal, we may find out that New York’s VAR offers a vendor-managed inventory program, centralized billing, and an online customer ordering portal. Each of these value-adds will help Procurement be more efficient, even if no hard dollar savings are generated. By properly researching the landscape, we can determine what value-adds are truly important and focus on building up these efficiencies.

Clamp Down on Maverick Spend

So far, we’ve consolidated spend to a single VAR (generating hard dollar savings via negotiated rebates and unit pricing using our newly consolidated spend as leverage) and improved our procurement process (generating soft dollar savings by understanding and implementing best practices).

We haven’t, however, talked about specific items being purchased. As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details,” and the very best supplier relationships can fall prey to maverick spend if employees are left to their own devices.

Consider all of the non-strategic, commodity spend that will pass through our VARs; items like cabling, computer peripherals, office equipment and a whole host of other small purchases are often included in contract pricing lists. But what about an employee who goes off the reservation, and orders off-contract? Your negotiated rates become meaningless. Would the purchase of an off-contract mouse by a single employee that is $5 more expensive break the bank? Likely not – however, this problem can get out of hand quickly if large groups of employees routinely ignore the on-contract equivalents. Analyzing spend and comparing it to negotiated on-contract items allows us to identify the problem and either reign in employee behavior, renegotiate the contract price list, or a combination of both to solve it before it gets out of hand.

Which Camp are you in?

If there’s one thing our tale of two VARs has taught us, it is that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Neither VAR may look like a poor partner at the outset. However, when you look at the entire picture, room for improvement becomes more obvious (especially if we’re willing to change it up). We simply can’t see that entire picture without performing a spend analysis in the first place.

By performing our spend analysis, we put ourselves in the position of moving between the three-foot and 30,000-foot view quickly, enabling us to look at our spend and supplier relationships from all sides. Only then can we effectively manage our spend.

Thanks, Brian.

Why Bother Classifying Spend? 3 Ways Spend Analysis Will Improve Your Life … Part I

Today’s guest post is from Brian Seipel, Spend Analysis lead at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations gain a clear view of their spend data to derive actionable budget optimization strategies.

Let’s face it, you and your team have your collective hands full keeping the Procurement trains running each day. Adding a spend analysis initiative on top of everything else being juggled? Well, that may be one ball too many to keep in the air. It seems like an unnecessary added step you simply don’t have time for and, really, what’s the point?

Through years of working with clients to develop and execute strategic sourcing initiatives, I have found there are two camps I can sort organizations into. Which side a client lands on is indicative of how much work lies ahead in terms of helping them truly control spend. Organizations will either be pro spend analysis… or barely spend time on the subject, if any at all.

To be fair, many organizations run a tight ship in terms of managing spend – but there’s still room for improvement for a good number of others. There are some great reasons to make a proper spend analysis a priority. As such, I wanted to take a minute to extol the virtues of this process to show some of the benefits you may be missing out on. See below for my top three reasons a proper spend analysis should be the next initiative you spend some time on.

A Tale of Two VARs

(Value Added Resellers)

First, I’d like to set the stage a bit. Consider the relationship between an organization and its IT hardware/software value-added resellers. In this scenario, we have two such VARs; one servicing the organization’s New York branch, the other servicing Philadelphia.

These two VARs have a lot in common. Both serve the same North East region, both offer stellar customer service, and so far the relationship has been good on all sides. Each office comes away satisfied after reviewing their VAR’s track record. But is that all there is to the story?

Generate More Savings

One of the most apparent (if not THE most apparent) reasons to analyze your spend is the impact such an analysis has on strategic sourcing initiatives. At the most basic level, an organization needs to know several key facts before developing a strategy around cost savings:

  • “How much money are we spending, and who is spending it?”
  • “Who is that money going to?”
  • “When are these transactions happening?”

These seem like simple enough questions, but getting the answers can be tricky. To kick off our VAR example, one great way to save money with such VARs is to leverage your spend volume to negotiate rebate structures and develop reduced unit pricing for all purchases. The more you spend, the bigger the rebate and the greater the incentive for VARs to offer unit price discounts – and these things can add up quickly. Consolidating spend to as few VARs as possible helps to maximize this strategy, and both our VARs service the same region. However, because New York and Philadelphia each use two separate VARs, neither will be able to negotiate as strong a rebate, and we likely won’t make much progress in commanding discounted rates. Each location may have a great relationship with its respective VAR – and Procurement wouldn’t know they were missing out on a savings opportunity until a spend analysis revealed this missing piece.

But this is just one way spend analytics will change your life.

Thanks, Brian.

Finally … A Good Use for Drones!

A recent article on Yahoo! Finance indicated that “MIT researchers use drone fleets to track warehouse inventory” specifically to help employees find particular items faster.

But the best use is regular inventory checks and fraud prevention. If the warehouse is lined with RFID readers and every inch is covered, then a system can be designed to flag when a palette is dropped at the wrong location, or when a signal expected to be there is not. But what a system can’t do is double check that a RFID chip is actually there. Once the palette has been read at the right location, and the inventory recorded, who’s to say the system will note when the inventory has been moved and used if a refresh is not performed on a regular basis or that
a hack has not been performed that can trick the system into believing the palette is still there when it has been moved.

In other words, the drone can make up for the inefficiencies in the non-mobile system. It can be programmed to traverse the entire warehouse every night and identify the errors in the system, which can immediately be investigated and corrected. While there is no sure way to prevent hacks that can lead to theft, any thefts would be identified much more quickly, which could increase the chance of recovery and, if the theft is for restricted / hazardous materials or technology, allow for responsible reporting that would keep the organization out of lawsuits and the CXOs out of handcuffs.

It’s a good use for drones. And one even the doctor can get behind.