M2M is about people
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.