TECH ROI | In the land of the free and the home of supersizing, we've all been
trained to think bigger is better. But just as good things can come in small
packages, big ROIs can be had from tiny technology.
Here are three (relatively) pint-sized technologies that have the potential to
pack a powerful ROI punch.
1.
Wearable PCs
For some travelers staying at Hilton's Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, part
of the fun is traipsing through the hotel's opulent art deco lobby to check in
at the ornate front desk. But many road-weary business executives would just as
soon skip the grandeur (and the wait) and head straight to their rooms. To
allow them to do just that, guest service agents (GSAs) with wireless tablet
PCs and small, wearable printers can bring the front desk to guests. GSAs can
check in business travelers as soon as they get out of their cars, or check out
departing vacationers as they step off the elevator. "We don't want to
force people to walk to the main lobby," says Thomas B. Spitler, vice
president of front office operations and systems at Hilton Hotels. "We've
even checked in groups on the beach in Hawaii."
Two years of piloting has convinced Hilton executives of the value of wearable
computers—small tablet PCs that communicate wirelessly with the Hilton LAN. At
roughly 9.5 inches by 8 inches, the Atigo M from Xybernaut offers a bigger
screen than a PDA. "That additional real estate allows us to give GSAs
floating in the lobby access to the same suite of tools they'd have if they
were behind the front desk," says Spitler. What's more, employees don't
need to spend time getting trained on a new mobile system; they just use a
stylus to access a virtual keyboard onscreen.
Agents also wear a tissue box-sized Zebra Cameo PEP printer and a small
magnetic stripe reader on a belt or carry it on a purselike strap over their
shoulder. At check-in, they use the device to swipe customer credit cards and
encode room keys as well as to print arrival, deposit and room number
confirmations. At checkout, agents use the devices to quickly generate itemized
folios. Because the printers are wireless Bluetooth-based, they don't need
cords to link them to the Xybernaut tablet PCs. Although an earlier version of
the Xybernaut tablet required agents to tote an external battery pack, the
current version runs on hot-swappable batteries that GSAs can replace on breaks
without having to power down their applications.
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"This technology is more about creating customer loyalty"
than ROI. —ROBERT MACHEN, |
Currently,
seven of the more than 350 hotels that Hilton owns or manages use Xybernaut
tools, with the cost to outfit one GSA being "south of $5,000, including
supporting technology," says Robert Machen, vice president of corporate
systems. Hilton also has plans to expand the program, despite a lack of hard
ROI numbers. "Quick, efficient check-in is an extremely important
metric," says Machen. "But this technology is not about trying to
create an ROI we can tie back to operational savings. It's more about creating
customer loyalty, and better positioning Hilton as a technology
innovator."
2.
Satellite in a Suitcase
When Hurricane Charley slammed into the Gulf Coast of Florida on Friday the
13th last August, hundreds of Hardee County residents lost their homes, and
thousands lost power and phone service. For Don Sarginson, deputy sheriff in
the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, getting called in to help "was
like going back in time 50 years." Deprived of phone service and Internet
connectivity, law enforcement agents had to fall back on using runners or
spotty two-way radio service.
The following night, Sarginson met with Matt Riley of Freedom4Wireless, a
company that provides emergency first-response products and services. Together,
they identified areas of the county for which restoring data communications was
critical. The next morning, it took Freedom4Wireless all of 10 minutes to set
up Tachyon Networks' Quick Deploy to provide data connectivity via satellite
across a 60-square-mile network. (Quick Deploy—which includes a satellite dish,
an IP-based router, a transponder and a receiver—communicates with satellites
on which Tachyon rents space.) Within minutes, first responders could use the
ad hoc network to access law enforcement applications over the Internet, view
images from video surveillance cameras in emergency relief distribution centers
and track the location of fire trucks.
Unfortunately, the storm worsened just as curfew for everyone but first
responders arrived on Sunday night. Worried that the Tachyon equipment was in
danger of damage from lightning, the Freedom4Wireless workers stowed the gear,
shutting down the network. Within five minutes, Sarginson and sheriffs from
other neighboring counties wanted to know what had happened to their network.
Five minutes after that, Freedom4Wireless reversed its decision and turned the
Tachyon system back on and restored communications.
Tachyon also offers Auto Deploy, its "satellite in a suitcase."
Starting at about $18,000, Auto Deploy lets users press a single button to
automatically point the unit's antenna at a satellite, providing Internet
access with T1-like performance. Tachyon clients rely on Auto Deploy for
disaster recovery and backup, instead of investing in a redundant T1 line. A
large power company, for example, uses Auto Deploy to provide high-speed
connectivity to corporate databases during planned—and emergency—maintenance
and repairs at its plants. Although satellite in a suitcase is small by
satellite standards, plan on a hefty tip for the bellhop. This suitcase weighs
a whopping 260 pounds.
3.
Magic Dust
At Edison's Nuclear Generating Station in San Onofre, Calif., each time one of
the large, '70s-era motors fails, the plant's power output drops between 20
percent and 25 percent for the three days it takes to fix or replace the
equipment. The company then must spend as much as $400,000 to buy replacement
power at emergency rates to meet customers' energy demands. Until now,
engineers checked the motors' temperature monthly, hoping to predict which
motors were about to fail so that they could preemptively rebuild or replace
them during scheduled maintenance periods. Monthly manual readings, however,
don't provide enough trend information to be particularly useful. "We did
monthly readings and we missed a lot of things," says Lloyd Pentecost,
maintenance engineer at the San Onofre plant. After two motors failed, it
became clear that monthly monitoring was insufficient. "We increased to
weekly readings, and it made no difference," he says, since readings can
vary based on the time of day or outside temperature. Then Pentecost installed
Wi-Fi-based sensors on eight motors to collect real-time trend data. "Once
you get real-time data, the problem jumps out at you," he says. But Wi-Fi
is expensive and poses a potential security risk. So Pentecost decided to try
out wireless mesh networked sensors.
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Wireless mesh nodes function as routers, monitoring
applications without the hassle of a wired network. |
With
wireless mesh networking, small, low-power communications nodes function as
routers, talking amongst themselves in order to monitor and control
applications without the hassles—and often prohibitively high installation
costs—of a wired or typical Wi-Fi network. Dust Networks' SmartMesh, for
example, has nodes (or "motes" as the company calls them) that wake
up as needed and digitize data from attached sensors, then send that data in
packets through an onboard radio to neighboring nodes. The data travels from
node to node until it reaches a line-powered node, which aggregates the data
packets, collects statistics and publishes data to a wired network where it can
be accessed by enterprise applications. Alternatively, nodes can send their
data directly to monitoring and control systems. The nodes can be hooked up to
actuators as well as sensors, so in addition to collecting data (such as
temperature or humidity readings), they can also give commands (to activate,
say, a fan if temperatures increase above a certain level)—all without any
additional wiring.
Dust's SmartMesh nodes are self-configuring, requiring no site survey and no
radio frequency knowledge. If a sensor goes out or is obstructed, the other
sensors will automatically reroute their data, thus forming a
"self-healing" network. Because the nodes turn on only periodically
to capture a reading and relay information, they need minimal power, operating
three to five years on two AA batteries.
Although this new technology shows great promise for building automation,
industrial monitoring and security applications, most early adopters are still
in the pilot stage. Pentecost tested four nodes from another "mesh
sensor" vendor, Sensicast, in the fall and was pleased with their
performance (they can transmit through walls and even relay to other nodes a
couple buildings away). In January, he plans to pilot a 16-node Sensicast mesh
network to monitor 16 additional motors at the plant. And he's confident that
wireless mesh will pay off. "We could put a Wi-Fi transmitter on each
motor, but you've got to run a conduit to it, and that drives cost out of this
world," he says. He expects to pay $500 per Sensicast node, plus another
$500 each for installation to cover the paperwork and analysis that must
precede any change in a nuclear power plant. (According to Sensicast, the price
for building control applications, which have less severe packaging and environmental
requirements than industrial applications, is $250 to $350 per node.) But given
the value of having near real-time data, Pentecost sees the investment as more
efficient than spending $2,000 a month on manual inspections. "If we have
data, we won't be flying in the dark," he says.
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By 2006, the market for wireless sensors could reach $625M |
At Supervalu, a grocery store operator and distributor
based in Eden Prairie, Minn., efficient use of energy is critical to the bottom
line, given the amount of refrigeration and lighting in your average
supermarket. But today, only about 20 percent of Supervalu's 261 grocery stores
have energy meters, and of those, approximately one-third have submeters that
can pinpoint the energy usage of specific pieces of equipment such as
refrigeration racks and condensers. It would be far too expensive to hard-wire
meters in every store, so to combat energy waste, Dan Bertocchini, corporate
director of energy management, has been testing a Dust SmartMesh network of
approximately 19 motes to monitor power usage by individual pieces of equipment
in a grocery store in Minneapolis.
Bertocchini figures that he can save as much as 80 percent of the cost to
install sensors by going wireless. Although he probably won't invest in
wireless sensors for every store, he's considering expanding the wireless
capability to multiple sites. "I'm thinking it may be easy to relocate a
mote to a different building," he says. "And we can work our way through
the stores."
Picking up and relocating motes—were they actually mote-sized—might prove
tedious and cause eyestrain of course. So while current Dust nodes can be as
small as bottle caps, buyers are requesting something a bit more manually
manageable—units about the size of two decks of cards and easily attached using
standard screwdrivers. There is, it seems, such a thing as too small.