This week’s big news is the release of our Tag n Track, satellite asset tracking service.  We’ve had a lot of customers ask to track things other than trucks, stuff like skids, mobile tanks, storage bins, railcars and the various pieces of equipment that get dragged around the farm and oil field.  It’s really amazing to hear what kinds of things get misplaced! With the service we’re providing several options for tracking these things, ranging from simple, once a day reporting to motion-activated reporting and even options for sensor and machine health data.

From a company perspective we’ve had a busy schedule in May and it’s only one week in.  In the first week alone we’ve presented and exhibited at two conferences.  First we presented “Remote Monitoring and Reporting of Conditions for Salt Water Injection Sites” at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, ND.  Just four days later, we presented “Car Wash Integration” at the NACStech conference in New Orleans, LA.  You might say we’re feeling a little crude, Upstream to Downstream in a single week!

You may have noticed some things have changed here at Pedigree.   We’ve changed the look and feel of our website and updated it to give you a more complete picture of the ways we solve operations problems with OneView applications.  We hope you enjoy the site and would love to hear your comments and feedback (ptinfo@pedigreetechnologies.com)

Perhaps even more exciting, this is only one of several great new changes on the way.  We continue to find new and interesting ways to work with our customers to solve real operational problems, which has led to several great new products for vehicle dispatch and navigation as well as asset tracking that are being rolled out .  We’re adding new partners and finding great new opportunities to help OEMs add value added services that will take us into some very exciting new markets.  Lastly, we’re adding some fantastic people to our family that will be tremendously valuable for our customers. 

So, have a look around the site and let us know how we can help you improve your operations. It’s why we built the site…and the company.

Spring is nearly here, which means at Pedigree we’re about to hatch some new products and features.  First of all, we’re going to be putting the finishing touches on a new web site over which highlight the full breadth of the solutions that can be delivered with OneView.  It will also allow us to build out a partners section to showcase the work we’re doing our equipment and service products to bring new services to market.  

Second, we will be releasing our dispatch module.  The product is currently in beta and the feedback we’ve gotten have been very enthusiastic.  We’ve got a very simple, yet powerful solution that perfectly compliments our solutions for fleet management, inventory and machine health monitoring.  The dispatch product is the key to the work we’re doing in field service automation to deliver true sense and respond capabilities for equipment, inventories and facilities.  

Finally, we’re seeing a lot of interest in our HVAC monitoring solution.  The more deployments we do, the more we see that the ability to do remote diagnostics and event notification has a tremendous advantage for field services companies.  This is really no secret, the telecommunications and cable companies have long known that these capabilities can reduce costs and improve margins if they can just reduce the number of “truck rolls”.  To say it more simply, they save money if they send the tech out there with the right part or equipment on the first call, instead of having to go on site, diagnose and then go back to the warehouse for parts.  Pretty straightforward and simple, but at the same time very powerful.  Kind of like Pedigree.

It’s that time again when we make our lists, set our goals and steel our convictions that this year is going to be different. At a time when people are putting some thought into making themselves more organized, efficient and productive it only seems fitting that we here at Pedigree make our own resolutions for the coming year. We try to practice what we preach to our customers, so in the spirit of doing what we say we’re going to strive to:

5. Do more with what we’ve got
Everyone has a list of things they’d get done if they only had the _____(time, money, resources). 2009 changed the way most of us think about adding costs to our operations and we are committed to making our existing resources more productive by implementing tools and programs to eliminate waste and automate our work processes.

4. Focus on what matters
In addition to doing more with what we have, we’re prioritizing our efforts to be the most impactful. We must be mindful of the old adage “don’t confuse motion with progress”. There is always more work than can get done, its critical that we address the issues of the greatest importance and allow ourselves to reschedule or delay acting on issues that are high effort, low impact.

3. Be a good partner
We’re in business because of our commitment to our customers, which means our business health depends on your business health. We strive to be a customer oriented organization, but that doesn’t assure either of our businesses are successful. We need to make sure that we support our customers and our partners by being proactive in understanding their needs and goals.

2. Make our people more effective
Employees are often recognized as the most important part of an organization and we at Pedigree certainly believe that to be the case. We see them as the life blood of our operations, yet we often find that we haven’t given them the best tools for the jobs they are doing. Its imperative that we invest in training and equipping the workforce, especially the ones in the field doing the actual work. We make it our business to make our customers’ employees more effective, in 2010 we will redouble our efforts to do the same for our own.

1. Listen to our customers
Yes it seems like a cliché but it cannot be over emphasized. Our goal is to be the #1 solution for supply chain, field force and operations management for the energy market. We believe strongly in our technical capabilities but the only way we become the market leader is by delivering solutions that our customer truly need and do it more effectively than the competition. We are going to make 2010 our best year yet and we’ll do our best to make that true for our customers as well.

We’d love to hear your resolutions and see how we can help you achieve them! You can reach us at sales@pedigreetechnologies.com.

Best wishes for a productive and prosperous 2010.

I got to spend some time on the road this week in the nations breadbasket, the great wide open spaces of the Midwest.  The crops are almost all in and the processing plants are going full tilt.  It was pretty evident that it doesn’t seem to matter how much we automate systems and process, people are still our most valuable assets.    It’s become a cliché but its still as true today as it was 100 years ago before farmers had augers and assembly lines were lines of people.  Combines don’t run, silos don’t fill and plants don’t produce without people. Technology has brought fundamental changes in everything from the way we plant and raise crops to the way we build and service equipment, but people are still an essential part of the equation and they always will be

Depending on who you ask M2M is an acronym for machine to machine or man to machine. Regardless of what you call it, the term doesn’t mean much to the people in the commodities industries, whether they pull potatoes or petroleum out of the ground.  But when you talk to them about things like automation, uptime, productivity and efficiency they get interested in a hurry.  Just another reminder that the benefit here isn’t more efficient machines it’s more efficient people.  A good farmer has always been able to tell you when its time to plant and when its time to harvest without technology, the difference today is that the combine can now tell him what it needs so that he can be sure to get the crop in when the time has come.  Makes you appreciate that growing healthy crops is never easy and growing healthy profits is even harder. 

With the recent media reports on my joining Pedigree its been interesting to see the responses.  Many of them commented on the difference between San Francisco and Fargo (about 30 degrees Fahrenheit in January), while others were curious about my choice to work with fossil fuels over green technologies.  Let me first say I am a proponent of renewable energy and we are working on a number of renewable energy projects.  My choice to join Pedigree was based on the opportunity to work with technology that makes an impact on fuel efficiency and energy consumption immediately, the benefit of which frequently ends up on the bottom line of small businesses.  According to a 2008 DoE report, the Transportation sector is responsible for 27.8% of the total energy consumption in the United States, 95% of which comes from petroleum products.  By providing real-time inventory, remote diagnostics and fleet management solutions, we are reducing the costs of transportation in fuel logistics  and field services by as much as 20%.  Additional efficiencies in HVAC, coolers and lighting from the Pedigree OneView system can impact power consumption in retail sites by almost the same amount. This means fewer unnecessary miles driven by trucks and fleet vehicles, less energy consumed and an overall reduction in the cost of operations−all translating into economic gains for small- to mid-sized businesses which are the lifeblood of our economy and vital to job creation. In contrast, for all of the promise of the "smart power grid," the primary beneficiaries are the utility companies who still must make substantial capital investments and may wait years for an ROI (and dependent on government subsidies), with little assurance that the eventual savings get passed on to the consumer. 

At the end of the day there is no single technology that will replace fossil fuels, especially in the Transportation sector.  Fact is oil is still the predominant energy source and Pedigree Technologies will do all it can to improve efficiency in a way that translates to the bottom line at a price virtually any business can afford.   Profitability is still the strongest motivator to reshape behavior, especially for small- and medium- sized businesses. It is the force that will drive us to renewable energy because there is a compelling economic case to do so.  Until then, we’ll have to make the most of what we’ve got.  That’s why I’m here.  

The other day I was sitting with one of our larger customers going over plans for the next phase of the Pedigree OneView deployment when I was reminded of the observations from Donald Rumsfeld that there are things we know we know, things we know we don’t know but it’s the things we don’t know that we don’t know that are the biggest concern.  The topic at hand was fuel inventory management and the customer was surprised to see how many wasted miles were saved when he could see his customer’s inventories and driver locations mapped on Google Earth.  The value of correlating information from different systems across the supply chain isn’t new, Wal-Mart figured that out decades ago, but I’m seeing more and more that we are changing is the costs of ‘knowing what you don’t know’.  A decade ago this was a huge capital expense in hardware, enterprise software and system integration (a mindset still clung to by the vendors that apparently don’t know that cash is king in today’s world), while today you can bring your assets and inventories online for the cost of a cell phone bill.  It’s always nice to hear those “Aha!” moments from customers when they see benefits above and beyond what they expected.  Wonder what else we don’t know…

Last time I talked about how Operations departments are typically working without the tools they need to efficiently do what they need to do. In fact, it actually hasn’t been technically or economically feasible until recently for anyone other than the largest, most heavily funded Operations groups to have the kind of tools they need. To expand on the “Impossible until now” idea we must identify that not one but rather a series of technical trends are coming together to provide organizations with incredible tools to get their jobs done more effectively.  Indeed, an interesting set of technologies and trends have coalesced into the perfect storm to produce technology, business and market conditions poised to bring the rise of the Operations Visibility Platform. As these technologies continue to intersect with each other, and as savvy technology providers begin forging these technologies into solutions, we will see more and more industries adopt an OVP to greatly improve the way they do business. What are these trends? Let us share with you:

 

• The advent of low cost communications everywhere (catalyzed by wireless technologies and services…you’ve seen the AT&T Wireless commercials where they’re at the fountain of youth and “Found the Internet”).
• The continued influx in the market of a wide variety of new cost-effective and very smart hardware devices and gadgets that help identify, track, locate, monitor and even control physical assets within an organization. (Think wireless sensors, RFID tags, cellular enable GPS devices – even phones with GPS, low-cost networking devices, etc.)
• The acceptance of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a legitimate communications platform for business.  (Everybody uses the internet now for almost anything from shopping to making a phone call to wiring funds, to watching TV, reading the news…did we mention emails?)
• The acceptance of the Software-as-a-Service solution delivery models.  What do we mean…delivering enterprise business software through your internet browser for a monthly fee.  Think Salesforce.com, Google, Ebay, Amazon and many others.

 

As these technologies and trends advance and continue to intersect, they can be brought together to provide industry with solutions that help them “Know Now” and do so cost-effectively.  Operations teams will be able to really “Do more with Less” because they will be able to optimize their resources to respond to real-time events, real-time inventory events, logistic events, equipment and maintenance events, facilities events, and personnel events.  They will be able to finally do this with one system or One Tool that encompasses their entire operations instead of many tools that don’t talk to each other.  We are one company that provides an “Operations Visibility Platform” or OVP. Industry will eventually see many others enter the market as well. I’m sure of it.

 

Next, we will be back to discuss the kinds of specific business problems that “Operations Visibility Platforms” can help solve.

Yesterday, I introduced the term Operations Visibility Platform or OVP. Let me explain why I think this is a burgeoning software category. When I talk about what we do at Pedigree to prospective customers and interested parties, I like to first go into my own little story of the acceptance curve of the various software solutions that have seemed to penetrate all industries over the past 20 years or so.  ERP and Back-office for accounting & finance, CRM for sales, marketing and customer support, IT with network management systems etc, etc.  Who has gotten the short end of the stick?  Well let’s ask who ALWAYS gets the short end of the stick.  One word:  OPERATIONS.

Poor Operations, always under the gun, always asked to do more with less, burning the candle at both ends, always responsive, subject to harsh time constraints, putting out fires, solving problems on the fly, working with a multitude of tools to try and do their job instead of the one size fits all solutions that every other department has gotten over the years.  ..…so what DOESN’T operations accomplish to ensure successful delivery of the goods and services of ANY organization?

Well operations people…you finally get yours.  But first I would like to plead innocence on behalf of your employers for being the last to get the systems and tools you need.  See it’s not their fault.  Truth is, it hasn’t really been possible until right about now. In reality is has been either technically impossible or far too expensive to provide you with the right system to encompass everything you guys/gals do in a day.  Why?  Because of out of all the departments in a typical organization, Operations is primarily concerned with real-time events and how to respond to issues as they come about.  Whether it is replenishing customer inventories, optimizing logistics, fixing equipment and product problems, managing facilities, ensuring people are going where they need to go and doing what they need to get done, Operations gets it done – but often with no appropriate tools or information to do it efficiently.

Next time I’ll talk about what has changed in the technology landscape to change this situation.

Welcome to our new company blog.  We are excited to get it off the ground and intend on keeping it updated frequently.  First of all let me begin by saying this:

The intent of this blog is to be a valued source of information for our hopefully many readers into the business values, solutions and trends associated with technologies that aid organizations by providing them with real-time operational knowledge or “visibility” through the tracking, locating and monitoring (and control) of their operational assets and products that make their organization run.

Some technical pundits are calling these technologies and business trends visibility solutions.  We agree, and in fact, we’re ushering in a whole new genre of software, and we’re calling it an Operations Visibility Platform or OVP for short.

Additionally, we intend to give our readers “Perspective Visibility” (I.E Our Perspective) into these visibility solutions. Hopefully you will find our content informative, useful and fun to read.  You might be asking yourself, “Don’t you guys provide solutions like this how could you be an objective source of information about them?” So my answer is this: We are a Software-as-a-Service company with HEAVY emphasis on the “Service”.  Fundamentally “Service” has to do with getting the client/customer exactly what they want, need and request.  That is a big change for the software industry in general.  We take the service side of “Software-as-a-Service” seriously.  So please stay tuned for valuable information that will hopefully help you improve your operational efficiency, and ultimately, your bottom line.