My Weekly Blog # 8

This past week has been pretty interesting. The highlight of the week was on Tuesday when we should of had class and the power was out by my place until 2:30PM. I only live about 8 blocks from NWTC Campus. It started out waking up at 7:50AM for class at 8:30AM and finding myself in a pretty dark house with it just raining buckets outside. My first fear was my sump pump which runs about every15 min. When I got up power was out for about 90 min already, so the pump would have run about 6 times. I went to the basement and my fears were confirmed with water about 6 feet out from the sump pump already.

Here goes my creativity kicked in high gear, I went to the garage and got a length of garden hose and kinda made a boom to corral the water. There is a floor drain about 8 feet from the sump pit and I positioned the boom to circle the drain and it worked pretty slick. The water did leak a little under the hose but the majority was channeled down the drain. This saved me one big mess. One problem solved.

With class being canceled due to the power outage we missed some important class time to start wrapping up assignments and duties for our verge project. Now we will just have to communicate a little differently this week. I already heard from Sandy, and Marty as they met at school and spent about 90 min in the cafeteria working on some issues. Way to Go Team Tigers. One thing that they added is a Doodle Board this is pretty cool as we can all go to this site and tweak our label design. I got all the info for the cost on getting a patent and it looks like between 9K and 12K with all the fees and attorney cost. This kinda surprised me as I thought it was always easy to get a patent. Just think if Thomas Edison had to do this today with his 1093 patents it would cost him over 13 million in just fees.

We have our assignments posted on our Wiki so everyone knows whats expected for next week as Marty will be soaking up the sun and golfing in AZ this week. Must be nice.So lets chat it up and be sure the work is being accomplished in a timely fashion. Feel free to contact me if any help is needed and I'll see what I can do to help. The six thinking hats seems like a cool way to brainstorm. Everyone wears the same hat until someone changes it and from what I understand it just flows from there depending on the color of your comment (hat). I hope everyone had a Great Easter and with only 3 weeks of school left time to put the hammer down. Hope to hear from all of you soon.

My week 7 Attitude

This past week we had the opportunity to tour WEL Transportation for my Logistics class and got to see some of the new innovations these people have employed. One of the items that caught my attention was a device on their trucks (they have 500 of them) that shuts off the engine if it idles for more than 10 minutes. This little device saves them over $175K a week in fuel. With diesel at $4 a gallon. Another thing they have done is switched from having dual wheels to a single tire on the drive axles and on the trailer axles. So now they are 10 wheelers sounds kinda strange but these new tires also save them fuel to the tune of about $100K a week so that's already a quarter of a million dollars a week or about 15 million a year not small change. The software programs that have come out for tracking everything from where the truck is sitting to its speed its going if they have to hit their brakes or even make a sudden lane change is just amazing. They can almost tell the driver when he has to stop and use the rest room. But seriously they will tell him when he is out of the number of hours he can drive and when he reaches his limit will shut down the truck for 8 hours.

In class we made a big step forward where we are now focused on the innovation process as opposed to the product itself. That will come with it. We now put more things on our Wiki like the assignments that each of us are responsible for. This will make accountability a little more obvious to all of us. Time to stop slackin and get this thing into high gear. The class exercise where we had to list what we did in regards to the 5 steps was great. We got to see how far we were compared to some of the other teams. I think we are in good shape.

 My innovative leader paper is on Thomas Edison and I choose him because when I lived in Florida I had the chance to visit his home and museum in Ft. Myers. He had over a 1000 patents when he died and that was just here in the US. if you count the other 34 countries he had almost 2500. I don't know if the guy ever stopped trying to make something better. One of my favorite quotes by Edison is "Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work" oh how true. Well I guess I still have my overalls on because there is a pile of schoolwork left to do for this week, lets see if we can put a dent in some of it. Til next week.

# 6 Posting

This past week we finally got to present our Google project even though it was a week later than usual. I think everyone did a great job even though Marty was a little long winded at times. Our graphics and slides were informative and I hope everyone enjoyed it. We used our Wiki to share information on this project and this is only going to help us on our verge project.
My blog is changing each week with some new ideas I get from class and my team members. This past week we were also shown how to put hyperlinks into our Wiki which will be great when we give our presentation later in the semester. This past week we also started to bring examples of innovation to class that we found in the news, or on the web. Some of the things were pretty interesting but I think mine was the most practical but I may be biased.
Our verge project is really moving ahead and we are sourcing vendors and manufacturers who can provide both materials and technology to produce and implement it. We are still coming up with alternate uses for our product and feel that it has many practical applications. A few people have e-mailed me back in response to some inquiries I made and have some positive information to share with my team.
This past week we had our Job Fair here at NWTC and over 90 employers were here. I don't know if that counts as innovation but I was able to network with at least 6 prospective employers and on Friday was contacted by one to come in for an Interview on Monday. This was for a part time logistics job with a local employer and has the possibility to turn into my internship which is a requirement for graduation. All of the HR people that I talked to liked my qualifications and the past work experience I have along with my strong grades I'm receiving during my time here at school. Which is what I have to do yet tonight is some additional research for a couple of my classes so I better get a move on. Til next week

Blog #5

Google has announced the launch of its +1 tool, which allows users to recommend search results to friends and contacts.
Resembling Facebook's Like button, Google's new feature works by providing a +1 button next to individual search entries which users can click to recommend a specific result to contacts.
To use +1, searchers must create a Google profile or upgrade an existing one. Users will then need to log into their Google account to see +1s from people they are connected to through Google Chat and Google Contacts. This is a innovative new feature that will make Google an even stronger presence.

This past week I was a little disappointed in one of my team members for not bringing our PowerPoint presentation to class as this reflects on all of us. Our presentation will be Tuesday the 5th and our profile is on Google. The other teams in our class gave some interesting facts about John Deere and GE, and what we add with our Google presentation should be fun.
Our verge team has now started on product designs for our label verge and I have seen a few of the examples. They are looking good and we should be able to get to the next step pretty quick.

This past week I joined the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals(CSCMP), one of the premier organizations in our field. We are able to post our resume on their site and get exposure Globally and search for jobs all over the world. This networking will bring many opportunities as this CSCMP is 8500 members strong with all different levels of supply chain expertise. Using these two new sources will make me more creative and innovative within my field.

We have a career fair at school this week with over 90 employers being represented and just in time, as we get our resumes' updated and refined so we can look as professional as possible. I hope I get some good job leads and will let you know next week how it went. Have a great week and wish for warmer weather.