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.