Tag Archives: North Dakota

About 1480 days ago Wireless Networks

Tech Talk: Pipe Supplier Networks Depots

CTAP has been supplying the oil and gas industry drilling in the Rocky Mountain region with tubing products and service for 25 years from its Louisville, Colo. headquarters. Andy Carlson, CTAP’s director of IT, tells IncTechnology.com that by centralizing the firm’s information environment and networking its storage yards along railroad routes the firm has improved inventory management, billing, and internal communication. Elizabeth Wasserman: How many storage yards do you manage in your business? Andy Carlson: CTAP supplies steel tubular products, pipe, and services for the drilling rigs in the Rocky Mountain region. We have our service yards strategically positioned on rail sites, where we can receive, ship, store, manage and service our customers’ needs. The tubing products we work with generally range from 20 feet to 40 feet long and are extremely heavy, requiring loaders and heavy machinery to move. We’re currently at six yards now located in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, and expect growth this year. Wasserman: What was the issue with communications between the yards? Carlson: This business has grown by acquiring other businesses and locations over 25 years. As a result, we have very different methods of management, communication and culture in each of these locations. The first task was to be able to standardize our method of inventory management, so we would know how much tubing has come in, how much has gone out, where it’s gone and who it’s for. Historically, this was accomplished on spread sheets and e-mailed into the corporate office on a weekly basis. We used that to assemble our billing packages for customers, but there was latency issue in the timing of the bills and the fact that we had no auditing trial at all. The communication of inventory information was not part of an efficient process and did not leverage available technology. Wasserman: What did you do? Carlson: I started at CTAP a year ago, and the first priority was to create a perpetual inventory management system. We needed a centralized information application and a centralized information environment. Given that I was the only IT person at that time, I needed a cloud based solution, and the expertise to design, build and implement it fast. I chose 3T Systems because they provided both of those services, and had worked well with them in the past. We developed our network environment based on Citrix. It allowed all of us including main office and yards to communicate on the same platform, through e-mail, file sharing, and application sharing. Today, we use the same working environment and we’ve been able to be consistent in the way we work. The second thing we did with 3T was to develop an inventory management application specific to when the product comes in and out of the yards. It’s a perpetual inventory management system so we can bill faster and have accuracy in terms of reporting, both internally and back to our customers. Our customers were asking questions such as, ‘How much of our tubing do you have at the Montana yard?’ It would literally take three days to figure out. Someone would have to go out and count and report back.  The spreadsheet would need to be re-keyed in, then adjusted for any last minute inventory level changes. Today, any one of us can get that information in 10 seconds.  Shortly, customers will be able to get that information on demand through our customer portal. Wasserman: What are the improvements that you’ve noticed? Carlson: It’s revolutionized the way we communicate, forecast and implement decisions. It’s contributed to our profitability in that we are able to assemble billing packages much more quickly.  It’s allowed our management team to monitor the inventory levels from a macro level, and respond to new business accordingly.  It’s allowed our sales team to monitor the inventory levels at the micro level, and respond to customer inquiries in real-time. It’s reduced a lot of errors and inefficiencies. Finally, we now have a competitive advantage over other businesses that provide similar services because of our information system. That’s a big improvement for our customers because sometimes we store some of their inventory, and the confidence they gain in our processes They like to know how much of their inventory is in our yards at any given time, and they now have the tools to get that information a lot quicker than they use to.

About 1784 days ago Tools on Managing Technology

Watchful Eyes: Outsourcing Video Surveillance

our beautiful site

Video surveillance cameras are no longer static fixtures that hang about unnoticed, their tapes only reviewed when the grim need arises. A number of managed service vendors are stepping up to provide round-the-clock digital access to video content via a subscription service, usually paid monthly. Take Brandon Knudsen. He has a toddler to help put to bed and a coffee shop to run. He used to race back to the shop after bedtime. But after installing new video technology just over one year ago, the coffee shop owner tucks his son into bed, then logs on to his computer to check out the goings on at Ziggi’s Coffee House in Longmont, Colo. More and more often these days, Knudsen manages his store remotely thanks to video cameras that continually stream their digital contents to a password protected website he accesses from home. Video helps in many ways Think of the service as roughly analogous to your cable television subscription, says Matt Steinfort, chief executive officer and president of EnVysion, a video surveillance managed service provider. You provide the video cameras in the same way you provide your existing TV to be wired to cable. The managed-care provider arrives at the small business to establish the Internet connection and the website. Should they go down, the provider repairs the connection. At EnVysion, a four-camera set up runs $150 per month. Installation fee is $1,000. The cameras can be used in a number of new ways to help small businesses pump up productivity. These include: Managing remotely. Small business managers and owners can access business footage in real time as Knudsen does, giving them the capability to check on employees and manage the store in off hours or from another location. Tracking shrinkage. The video systems can be integrated with point of sale system and searched by date, time, or transaction. Business owners can also create reports that will display video from pre-selected parameters such as transaction time. In this way, they can view and analyze suspicious transactions. Better marketing. Digital video can identify customers’ connections with products and analyze their retail behavior. In a retail environment it can also analyze customer traffic patterns, helping to improve store layouts, says Stan Schatt, ABI Research vice president and research director. An ABI Research report released in May predicts a fourfold increase in video surveillance software revenue over the next five years. Training. Knudsen reviews videos to ensure employees make coffee drinks correctly. Sounds mundane, but too many excess ingredients and the costs add up. Make a drink incorrectly and customers complain. Cost reduction or containment. One Envysion customer locates cameras near the pizza production area to record the number of pepperoni going on each pizza. These numbers help when tracking product usage, Steinfort says. Security benefits, too For his part, Knudsen used the video to track why his 2007 hard-goods costs came to 40 percent of overall costs rather than the expected 30 percent. “We discovered employees were giving out cups for water and splitting drinks into plastic cups,” he says. “They didn’t think it was a big deal, but when you add it up over the cost of the year, you’re talking $1,000 in plastic cups. In a couple of months, we got costs down to where they should be, in the 30 percent range.” Rather than searching through realms of videotape, business owners can quickly review specific events based on time of day or other parameters. At the Stooper Stop convenience store in West Fargo, N.D., the recorded images helped local police quickly apprehend a thief who stole nearly $200 in cash, says Todd Jacobson, owner. The theft happened five years ago but is still fresh in Jacobson’s mind. Because he could quickly direct officers to the exact moment on the tape the theft took place, the police apprehended the suspect in just over three hours, he says. “The guy just returned home after the crime and hadn’t even taken off his coat,” says Bethany Johs, chief executive officer at byRemote, the vendor that provides Jacobson’s video system.

About 2453 days ago Mobility Tips and Tricks

Why Cell Phones are Replacing the Laptop

our beautiful site

Ten years ago, the BlackBerry was known as a Wall Street icon or a geek organizer, far too expensive and nerdy to be used by mere mortals. Today, “BlackBerry” is the new “Kleenex,” the generic name people give to any personal digital assistant, or PDA. Treo and other companies are giving BlackBerry a run for its money, while cute devices like the T-Mobile Sidekick have made owning a PDA-like cell phone hip. When little portable computer phones get Paris Hilton endorsements, it’s safe to say that their bigger cousin, the laptop, is going the way of the dinosaur. “In a physical sense, there are many phones that now have QWERTY keyboards and scaled down Intel processors,” says Kurt Collins, business development manager at Photobucket, an online publisher of visual digital content. “Many PDA phones come with software that allows the user to not only check e-mail, but also read and write Microsoft Office documents.” Cell phones and PCs now rank as the most important devices for American consumers under 40, outranking even the TV, according to a survey by Forrester Research. The way that translates into the business market is that more and more consumer technologies are being used by workers in the office and out in the field. Laptop sales are, by some estimates, on schedule to outpace PC sales. But cell phones are already surpassing land-line phones in such locations as Europe and certain states, such as North Dakota, according to regulators. In mid-2006, the number of cellular connections in the world reached 2.5 billion, having just climbed over the 2 billion mark a year ago, according to estimates from Wireless Intelligence, a research venture that tracks the global market for mobile technology. The sharp trajectory of growth for cell phones and the growing number of PC-like features being incorporated into their design are fueling the theory that the cell phone is becoming the new laptop. Here are the reasons why: It can e-mail. The most mundane cell phone — the kind that comes free with a phone plan — has e-mail as a standard feature. It is usually carrying AOL and Yahoo!, but MSN’s Hotmail can be accessed indirectly. The low-budget phones require multiple number pad strokes to type individual letters, but several reasonably-priced phones have QWERTY keyboards, the standard computer keyboard. Some brands offer nearly full-sized keyboard attachments that connect to the phone. It can Web-browse. Every major cell service offers Web browsing for a few extra dollars a month. Many sites, such as Google and MSN, format their pages for easy cell phone reading. Cell phone companies also aggregate content, making it easy to get the latest world, business or entertainment news on the phone. It is small. Traveling with electronics is cumbersome, especially for those who are on-the-go all the time. At airports, laptops must be taken out of their bags, placed on the security conveyor belt and gathered up on the other side of the gate. A cell phone simply needs to be turned off at takeoff. It has Windows. Windows Mobile has now come into its own on portable devices. It’s getting to the point where all software — Word, Excel, perhaps even PowerPoint — will be on your cell phone. It has Bluetooth capabilities. Also becoming a standard, Bluetooth allows your cell phone to communicate with other phones and computers in a fast, efficient way. Files can be transferred quickly between your computer and your cell, turning your phone into a virtual memory stick. It is cheaper (for now). The biggest threat to the bulky laptop is price. A top-of-the-line, fancy cell phone will cost you about $600, or one-fourth the cost of a top-of-the-line, fancy laptop. Until the mythological $100 notebook is commonplace, cell phones are the cheaper and more efficient road to take.

About 3488 days ago Computer Security

What’s Next: Data Disasters

When it comes to the Internet, nothing is ever really forgotten and everything leaves a trail. This can be good or bad for business, depending on where you stand in relation to the law. These data trails can be used to find who has been stealing your trade secrets–or to bust you if you are the thief. They can show who is working and who is goofing off. They can tell you a heck of a lot about who your online customers are, allowing you to make better decisions and more money. This information is extraordinarily valuable, and there are laws that require companies to produce it, and do it right now. But it hasn’t been easy to do until a San Francisco start-up called Addamark Technologies figured it out. In the pre-Enron, pre-WorldCom, pre-Tyco, pre-you-name-the-crooked-company days, the legal rules for retaining communication records said only that a company had to be consistent. You couldn’t, for example, keep all e-mails except those having to do with a hostile takeover or a case under litigation. If it was your company’s policy to erase all old e-mails once a year or once a month, that was okay, as long as the policy was in writing and was strictly followed. Enron, for example, wiped clean its e-mail slate every 72 hours, which is hardly a surprise. Today the rules have changed. Public and many private companies have to keep a copy of written communication of every type (letters, e-mails, even Internet instant messages) for up to seven years. You have to keep the copies in a form that allows their authenticity to be verified, whatever that means. Not only that, but you must keep a second copy of every message in a different location in case of fire or natural disaster. The second copies must be on nonerasable storage media, such as optical disks. And if the SEC asks you to provide a copy of any given document or every given document you have until close of business today to do it. Almost no company can do this. If you are a health care organization, an insurance company, or even a human resources department, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires as of this year that if a client asks you for a list of every person or organization with whom you have shared his or her medical records you have to provide that list…on the spot. Almost no organization can do this. And if you aren’t a public company, don’t engage in health care, or have no human resources department, you still aren’t off the hook, because these are becoming the accepted standards for all companies. If you still dump e-mail every 72 hours and end up in court, you are effectively guilty as charged. Penalties for noncompliance right now are mild, but they are sure to get stronger in the future, right up to sending people to jail. The new SEC regulations, for example, hold the CEO personally responsible for record retention, meaning he or she, not some nerd in the computer room, will be doing time. Then there are the civil penalties that will come from the inevitable lawsuits. It is possible that every customer of a hospital or clinic could walk into small claims court tomorrow and walk out with $1,000 or more because the paper trail of who got their records couldn’t be produced or was incomplete. Every hospital and clinic in America is vulnerable, for they are all in violation. And while HIPAA doesn’t specifically provide for private legal actions, neither does it prohibit them if other laws are being violated too. So we’re in a whole lot of legal trouble and most companies don’t have the technology to comply with laws already on the books, much less the even stricter ones likely to follow. It could have been argued that these legal requirements are unreasonable, but then along came Addamark. And then there is data theft. Electronic documents are stolen all the time, and it usually isn’t through some high-tech cracking scheme but an inside job. The bad guy is often a disgruntled employee, or someone who appears to be an employee but is really a competitor using an employee’s login name and password obtained through a process called “social engineering.” “This is Mitch in IT; we’re working on the network and need your login and password to check something out.” Only Mitch is calling from your top competitor. This really happens. There is an evidence trail of all this in your phone system and on your servers, if only it could be found. The problem here isn’t generating the information, which is done automatically by every e-mail, database, or Web server application. The problem isn’t storage, because data storage is cheap and always getting cheaper. The problem is finding what you need–a problem that until recently looked insurmountable. Log data, which is what we are talking about, is huge. Just the e-mail system for a large company can generate terabytes of log data per day (that’s one thousand billion bytes) concerning who said what to whom and what path the message followed. That’s for one day. The new SEC regulations say a company has to hold those records for approximately 2,000 days, and most companies are deciding just to keep them forever. Finding what you want in this pile of data would seem to be an easy problem for computers to solve, given that they are so good at fetching and carrying. Servers generate log files indicating what happened to every file or message, log files go into a huge database, and you run queries against this database, right? Unfortunately these log files are bigger than any database ever. They are bigger than database designers ever expected files to be. They are almost too big to even function in a database application. That’s because when data is inserted into an Oracle or IBM DB2 database application, the data gets bigger. It grows by about 30% as metadata (data describing the data) is added. The result is a pile of data petabytes in size (one thousand terabytes). That’s not too much data to store but it’s too much data to search. It could take days, weeks, months to find what you need. Until very recently the only searchable logging databases of such size I had heard of were at Amazon.com, eBay, and Google–each developed privately over a period of years and costing, in the case of Amazon at least, hundreds of millions of dollars. Amazon.com says it has so far spent more than $900 million on computer technology for its business and continues to invest at a rate of $200 million per year, a lot of it going to massaging log data. Faced with spending $200 million to avoid a $25,000 fine from the SEC, most companies would pay the fine–except for that little part about the CEO going to jail. It could have been argued that these legal requirements are unreasonable, even unenforceable. But then along came Addamark Technologies, which changed everything. Addamark makes the storage and searching of petabyte logging databases not simple but easy, and easy is what counts. What couldn’t be done at all can now be done in seconds and for around 1% of what Amazon.com paid for the same capability. Addamark began as an idea in the mind of Adam Sah, who was at that time head techie at Internet Pictures, or iPix, which owns the servers that hold all those pictures of goods for sale on eBay and throws them onto your screen. With an average of 16 million items for sale each day on eBay, most of them having one or more pictures, that’s a lot of images. It is also a lot of surfing, since iPix had to transmit those pictures over and over again as required by 50 million potential bidders. Because iPix was paid every time a picture was transmitted, its log files were essentially its billing system and Sah wanted to find a way to generate a detailed bill every day. Rather than just throw the log data into Oracle or DB2, Sah thought about log data and how it is different from other kinds of database entries. It doesn’t change, for one thing, since logs are entirely retrospective and are supposed to tell the truth. Sah found that you can strip log data down to its barest form, then compress it at least 10-to-1 (something you can’t do in a regular database), then actually search the compressed data for what you need. The result is a new type of specialized database that can be of almost limitless size yet can be searched in seconds. Addamark can be filled with any kind of log data from any logging application, and if you want to see every e-mail that mentions Microsoft or which times and by whom a confidential document was transmitted, Addamark produces the goods almost instantly. All this and it runs not on mainframes or even big servers but on clusters of commodity PCs. Expanding your Addamark system can mean a trip to BestBuy. Addamark is shipping today, to customers that include Agilent Technology, Blue Cross-Blue Shield of North Dakota, Lehman Brothers, and Yahoo. In a high-tech depression this is a company that turned away venture capitalists. It is a 30-person firm at which 12 of those 30 are former CEOs or founders. Addamark, with its patented technology, could be the next Oracle. Remember the name; you might need it. Robert X. Cringely is a writer, broadcaster, and entrepreneur specializing in technology. Contact him at cringely@inc.com.

About 3823 days ago Business Software

Rental Health

The Fourth Annual Inc Web Awards: Killer Apps Company: SafeRent, in Denver URL: www.saferent.com What we liked: The technology lops days off and eases what used to be a lengthy, painful, and often subjective decision-making process The only thing as stressful as waiting for a doctor’s call is waiting for a call from a potential landlord. Would-be renters fret for days about whether they’ll snag that desirable roof, while apartment owners try to calculate the likelihood that some young applicant attired in a nice suit will skip out, leaving the joint looking like Marilyn Manson stayed there. Or both parties can get an answer in minutes. That’s the promise of SafeRent, which in four years has screened applications for more than a million apartments in every state except North Dakota. The $12-million company offers landlords and property managers access to the usual renter credit reports and eviction histories. But it also applies a proprietary statistical model, developed at Harvard University, which takes such data as an applicant’s income and credit history, combines it with information about the lease, and compares all that with a database of more than 100,000 anonymous renter histories. Based on the income, debt, and bill-paying patterns in those histories, the model calculates a score that is used to predict whether this particular rental agreement “will end happily for the landlord,” says Linda Bush, SafeRent’s CEO and one of its founders. In other words, SafeRent knows whether comparable kids in suits renting comparable apartments have generally paid up on time. SafeRent’s customers own or manage, on average, 5,000 rental units and pay $7.95 to $14.95 per search. They use SafeRent’s Web site to create profiles of their properties (how old they are, how much they rent for) and to set a level of risk that they find comfortable. (Usually, the more upscale the property, the lower the acceptable risk.) When an applicant comes calling, the landlord or property manager plugs in rental and deposit amounts and enters the applicant’s name, address, Social Security number, and income information into the site, and within 30 seconds, the system returns a recommendation: accept, decline, or accept with conditions such as an additional deposit. Landlords and property managers, in turn, feed rental histories from their own properties back into SafeRent’s database, increasing the size of the sample against which to compare new applicants. “It helps the landlords cut down significantly on bad debt,” says Bush. “But it also helps renters. There used to be a series of hoops to jump through. They don’t make three times the rent, so they’re out. They make three times the rent but they’ve been 30 days late twice, so they’re out. We evaluate all the information together, and we put it in perspective. We’re helping responsible consumers get a place to live.” The Fourth Annual Inc Web Awards Killer Apps Printing Money Rental Health Lab Retrievers Take My Payroll, Please Hoof and Math Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.