No wires required

Whatever they say about WAP (mobiles’ wireless application protocol), it would be difficult to exaggerate the scale of the mobile revolution about to engulf computing. In a swathe of industries, the laptop is about to become extinct. Not even the PC as we know it is safe from mobile (non-wired) technologies like the personal digital assistant (PDA) and Bluetooth, which threatens (eventually) to do away with wires altogether. But in manufacturing, especially in the UK, the revolution has been cancelled. Why? You would think no industry was immune to the PDA’s charms. Wherever anyone wants combined computing and communicating power on tap, the PDA provides it. These things cost under £400 and fit in a shirt pocket. As Kevin Tea, a UK consultant who specialises in mobile computing, says, while the sales rep is tucking into his Little Chef Early Starter en route to his first call of the day, he is collecting his emails, receiving sales memos and updated Excel spreadsheets containing up to the minute stock levels. “They can throw away the laptop,” says Tea. “The PDA will keep diaries, run Word, spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations, or (with a GSM phone with an infrared connection) send and receive email. It can hold hours worth of MP3 music or even, with the new breed of Windows CE devices, run videos.” The obvious application is in customer relationship management (CRM). But there’s much more: production staff could monitor any machine from anywhere on the largest plant floor, and email maintenance about any problems. Field maintenance staff could avoid a lot of unnecessary journeys in a similar way. And just imagine the savings that could be made by identifying a fault in the field and sending the info round to everyone who should see it – especially the supplier responsible for the fault. Imagine the limitless possibilies this offers to companies which have to move at the highest possible speed to react to the changing demands of, say, supermarkets or DIY sheds. And imagine too the chaos if a salesman takes an order for 10,000 units not knowing that one of his colleagues on the other side of town has used up a week’s capacity with an order for 50,000. As Tea concedes, in those circumstances it’s vital for all the sales staff “to be in constant contact. It is a matter of keeping in touch.” You can bet they won’t. But there’s no need for concern because, among UK-owned manufacturers at least, it isn’t happening. Tea has yet to be engaged by a manufacturing client. Much of mobile computing used already is to hasten retail ordering. Two examples from supplier Deliver-e include G Costa, which supplies food retailers, caterers and wholesalers with Tabasco, French’s Mustard and other specialty foods, and Premier Paper, which exports Scandinavian paper round the world. Security is another driver. Retailer Goldwin Sportswear sews TI’s Smart Labels into Chinese-made skiwear to counter ‘grey’ imports and ‘shrinkage’ (theft by staff), and reduce picking times. The uncopiable tag can carry a unique product code, batch number, colour, size, distribution and customer details. Similarly, Xerox’s main European copier plant, in Mitcheldean, Glocs, UK, delivers 250,000 copiers a year. With help from Microlise, EDS and tag distributor RFID Components, Xerox installed transponders in the outer packaging of each copier. The tags are read at goods out and matched to the shipping destination and other details. This stops any copier being mounted on the wrong truck. Carlsberg Tetley uses a similar system to track the movements of pallets and kegs between its brewery and the main distribution centre. In the US, they’re more imaginative. Michelin sales staff monitor the tyres of up to five lorry fleets a day to let their customers know how the tyres are wearing. The information used to be collected on paper. Now they use Palm computers. Volvo’s US import business uses Palms to do dockside quality checks on 125,000 vehicles a year at four ports. Automotive sector leads Industrially, cable-free hand-held technology is most widely used in warehousing and distribution. There’s a thriving market in wireless bar-coding equipment, though even this is not problem free (see below). But hardly any UK industrial companies use this technology as much as, say, General Motors, which has supplied the International Article Numbering Association (AIM Global) with a guide to the wireless and other technologies GM suppliers have to use if they are to keep GM’s business. According to this, “[Radio frequency] access points placed throughout the building allow workers in shipping, receiving, production and quality control to print barcode labels and research product information with their mobile computing devices.” Tier-one automotive supplier Delphi has rolled out Psion Teklogix mobile computing systems to integrate wireless systems with Delphi’s Vega programme – a plan to install the SAP R/3 ERP system, EDI and other applications throughout Delphi world-wide. Psion’s warehouse management application controls “the inventory of goods to be manufactured, the production of assemblies on the shop floor and indicates the availability of material in their work centres for just-in-time inventory management.” Talson St Croix, integration services coordinator at Psion Teklogix’s Aix-en Provence office, says that the system controls the flow of components into and out of production. It uses backflushing to adjust inventory records as products are assembled and components are used up. Psion says the system was applied in 24 Delphi sites across Europe in the $6.5 million Vega Phase One and is now being applied in Spain and Morocco in Phase Two. But that’s it: so far little mobile computing links the production floor with the sales force or anywhere else. It’s hardly that wire-less technology is either new or too fragile for use in factory environments. The Philips Premid microwave radio transponder for the shop floor, a 20 character, intelligent ‘radio tag’, was installed in Vauxhall car factories almost 20 years ago. Land Rover swore by them to carry customer, order and build information to tie a particular body to a particular skid. For now, the manufacturing experience of mobility is confined to pick-and-put warehousing applications, and even these have not been entirely happy. Delta’s plumbing products division makes thousands of water and heating pipes and pipe-fitting products. Its seven warehouses all over Europe receive products made on the same site, those bought in, and those coming from other Delta factories for distribution both to retail and wholesale outlets and back to other Delta factories. Delta’s IT director, Philip King, says Delta couldn’t survive in the plumbing business without high customer service levels. But it wanted to improve efficiency in picks per hour – reducing costs – and improve accuracy: “If you have somebody manually picking, making a note of what they’ve picked and keying it in later, that’s subject to error.” Inaccuracies not only cause problems with returned goods, credits and so on, but, “Customers don’t like it… If you can give the picker the information on a gun in his hand it becomes much more efficient than if he’s got to keep going back for papers and then keying in information at a terminal.” Improving accuracy In 1999 Delta began to install a real-time wireless LAN from Symbol Technologies in a pilot at its Tipton, West Midlands site. Symbol’s hand held and truck mounted wireless guns and terminals read bar code labels and show messages which tell each order picker what to pick next, which location – or locations – to put it in and in what quantity. When the Tipton site went live in July 1999, the plan was to install further systems in Delta factories in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and the UK: “We’d already got a [Teklogix] wireless system in [our German warehouse],” says King, “and we were happy with the way that operated… We didn’t complete the project because we ran into all sorts of difficulties with it. We got as far as putting it into Spain. We rolled it out in Tipton, Germany and Spain, and then we called a halt.” The German warehouse is now operating a full RF system. Spain and the UK are operating limited RF systems. The technology, King thinks, was more complex than it needed to be. Delta wanted to integrate its picking system with the JD Edwards ERP system Delta was installing at the same time. The guns communicated not directly with the JDE and the AS/400 it ran on but through the LAN server, which runs software developed by a Symbol partner, Data Systems Inc (DSI). The DSI server configures the screen information that goes out to the guns, receives information from the guns and then transmits that back to the AS/400. The basics still apply King says this link needed debugging and he would now link the guns and the AS/400 direct. But this problem paled into insignificance beside the complexity of the number of products and locations. “We’ve got 50,000 items on the item master and in the larger warehouse there would be up to 10,000 locations… To be honest the biggest problems were internal ones, just in terms of all the simple things that aren’t simple, like having the correct bar codes, not having duplicated item numbers, having standardised item numbers, having physically in the location what the system thought was in the location. Those are the big issues, no matter which system you use. “As far as accuracy goes we thought we were quite good. Our return rates were fairly small. But when we were shipping ‘over’ of course, nobody was saying anything. When we shipped ‘under’ not all the customers were checking anyway.” Tea believes manufacturers have not embraced serious mobile computing yet for two reasons. One is that market conditions make it difficult for them to think about anything but survival, never mind investment in new technology. The other is that adopting mobile computing is powerful but profound. As far as business processes are concerned, says Tea, “You have to rebuild from ground zero usually. You’re looking at a totally different way of working.” King is optimistic. The RF experience has led to vastly improved housekeeping at Delta. And the new technologies, like WAP, have only been stalled, he believes. “They’ll soon begin to kick in”.