Implanting IT

Moving past the marketing

If bringing together an IT issue is tough, I imagine deciding what and how much IT to integrate into your business is even tougher. Breaking through the marketing hype and deciding what you really need, after all, can be difficult. Of course a GPS provider will tell you that you need GPS, an RFID vendor is going to push his tags and a software developer will insist that her product is the ‘streamlined’, ‘tailor-made’, ‘one-stop-shop’ solution for you. We at LOG.Middle East heard many such statements this month.

In fact, we were relieved to come across the honest remarks of one logistics provider who described RFID as just another way for consultants to make money. Sadly, however, he asked for the quote to be removed, so we went ahead and removed his article.

But let’s not bash RFID too much. The costly technology will prove useful for inventory you cannot afford to lose. Damas jewellery, for example, is using it to keep tabs on its stock and American passports apparently have RFID tags hidden neatly away in their covers.

Soon, you and I may have our own personal RFID chips, which we use as portable health insurance, ATM and credit cards. Don’t even bother shoplifting with one of these in your arm.

By the way, did you notice that the cost of fuel is rising? At this point you can sit and cry over your invoices, or you can use these hard times to proactively change the way you do business. This means investing in fuel efficient technologies and carefully planning your routes. If oil prices are ever to drop, the changes you make now could lead to major profits in the future.

Perhaps one of your strategies to offset rising costs is switching from air or road freight to sea freight. But do you ever really think about what happens out on the open ocean? In this issue, Casey McFann provides us with a guide to maritime shipping and a First Officer helps Munawar Shariff uncover the mysteries of life at sea.

China, to most of us, remains a mystery. We all know the country is growing faster than even the Middle East. But how do we get a piece of this growth? Anyone who can find a way to fill up the empty containers heading from this region to China is in for big bucks. Containers moving from China to the Middle East, after all, are already packed full. I wonder if China has any need for sand. For this, we’re going to need some marketing hype.

Kathryn Semcow
Editor
kathryn.semcow@dvvmedia.com