Philip Eng

Philip!!! I noticed this was posted on last semester’s MIS page – just wanted to flag for you so you get your credit!!

Phillip- Great article! My company is dealing with the same problems with demand, supply, and production. Our team is particularly segmented between the selling department and the maintenance/customer service department- during the pandemic, our Sales team which works from home, was not effected in the slightest and continued to sell as normal. My production and customer service teams, both of which works in-house, were sent home for temporary pauses in production, and then were sent home to work from home- something that’s never been done before. While the two support teams struggled to find a groove that works for them, the Sales team continued to sell at full tilt. This has created a divide between departments farther than I’ve ever seen. We are currently trying to find ways to reduce this gap, and the only clear solutions would be to incorporate technology and new equipment that alleviates this divide. Currently trying to show my team the benefits of AI.

Thanks for this personal insight! While I don’t work in production, I definitely feel your pain as it is similar to what our company has dealt with. At the beginning of the pandemic, I honestly had not thought about all the new launches/products coming out that production had to put on hold while being in lockdown, simply because they couldn’t work from home. Luckily, they were one of the first departments to go back, while many of us are still refraining from doing so because of the nature of our jobs.

Similar to automation in production, I think the same can be said about warehouse jobs. What you said about e-commerce booming, but production being limited struck a chord. Not only did that happen 6 months ago, but what is continuing to happen is we are constantly backed up with e commerce orders/returns/exchanges; due to pandemic restrictions, we have limited staff in our warehouses. So while customers are able to shop online all day and get things sent to their door with the click of a button, we sometimes cannot meet those needs as quickly as we’d like. RPA and AI would definitely be helpful in the assembly line as well as warehouse!

Thanks for sharing Phillip! It’s really interesting reading about the struggles the manufacturing industry as incurred because of COVID-19. We’ve actually been on the other end of those struggles. Thanks to the appliance shortage (https://www.pennlive.com/coronavirus/2020/08/pandemic-causes-national-appliance-shortage-ive-never-seen-the-demand-like-it-is-now.html), it took us months to get a new washing machine after ours broke. It would have been a lot more convenient if manufacturing facilities had already perfected the AI and RPA technologies that you mentioned in your article before the pandemic so a new washing machine could have been available for us sooner. However, there needs to be some thought to the human side of this work. Manufacturing facilities employ such an enormous amount of workers around the world. What would happen to all of these people’s jobs if everything immediately became automated? I think that’s something that the industry is going to have to consider if this technology is ever perfected to the level where mass amounts of workers could be replaced.

Social distancing inside a production facility is not something I had thought of before. You are right, this could greatly speed up the integration of automation into the production process. This could be a double hit to works who are unemployed because of COVID and now have no job to return to because of robots.

Hi Phillip!
I think Apple and Microsoft have build two totally different app-download platforms, and I tend to think that their individual methods work best for their audiences… For example, Apple’s deep-pay but highly secure purchasing platform also utilizes a stricter sense of app approval- meaning some apps on the Microsoft store or other platforms never make it to Apple because their app requirements are usually much higher than other competitors. This results in a high-end play store, with only the best of the best purchased and displayed. On the other end, Microsoft operates as a more open forum, where coders that meet a certain standard can post their products to get to a wider audience without a lot of security and approval measures. This makes a lower-end economic play store that is attractive to a wider audience that may not care for the luxury or high-end of the Apple store.

I find it funny that Apple and Google are siting data security as the reason for the high fees. Apple is a little better, but they both do all kinds of things with our data that we do not want them to. My fear with this 30% is how much of it is being based onto the user. If a company knows it needs to sell at $5 to make a profit, and they know they will loose 30%, they will charge the user $7 to cover the fees. So, me as a user is paying two extra dollars because of Apple’s and Google’s money grabs.

Philip I enjoyed reading this analysis! I was reading an article about the house of representatives and its stance on this issue. It said that in order to combat this monopoly, its main proposal is the “requirement of structural separations of large companies, which would force these tech companies to be broken into different smaller companies.” I understand why this is such a controversial issue as from one side this could be considered a monopoly but on the other hand don’t you think it also limits capitalism? The fact that a company can be considered too large is concerning as the government can have the power to limit the success of independent companies. Selfishly, as an apple user, I enjoy the ability to have all applications in one store as they can be easily asequible instead of having to look for one app in multiple sources. For that reason, I would not want apple to have to be broken into smaller companies but rather to maybe limit its profit gain on the apps or even creating programs for smaller companies who want to get into the market so that they have a more asequible price point.

Here is a great article I found on this issue:

App Store gives Apple ‘monopoly power’ over iOS apps, US House antitrust report says [U: Apple responds]