What Hot Wheels And Bin Dumpers Can Teach Us About Business ...

Have you ever stopped to wonder why the cost of some items at the store have not inflated over the years and in a few cases, even have decreased in price? Take Hot Wheels for example, the tiny toy cars most of us grew up playing with. When I was a boy 30 years back, those tiny cars cost around two or three bucks at the toy store. In recent times (when I was buying them for my children) I could find them for as inexpensive as 97 cents! How does this occur?

Some would say that a lot of it's got to do with the outsourcing of the manufacturing to countries where worker costs are much lower. But using the example of Hot Wheels again, they were already being made in Asia in the early 1970's, back when I was purchasing them.

So how else could something that sold for more in the 1970's sell for less today? I think we have established it is not determined by lower work costs so the reason must be attributed to another part of the manufacturing or distribution process.

Knowing that technology in general has also advanced more in the last 4 decades than any other time in history should give us some hint as to why some manufactured products have not increased in price. Information technology itself has evolved to the point at which businesses can now depend on software programs to effectively follow selling patterns to employ just-in-time stocking and distribution techniques that make sure that they don't spend unnecessary resources on carrying items that don't sell fast enough.

The rise of the data age has also resulted in explosive growth in computer directed manufacturing equipment that can mechanically retrieve raw materials from bin locations and then make finished product from these materials. This automated equipment is faster and is more accurate and since it can run up to twenty-four hours a day, also can be appreciably more productive than human labor.

In some industries, like the food industry, for instance, technology has permitted food producers to replace labor-intensive work such as hand dumping food products onto production lines with robotic bin dumpers. A bin dumper can dump a thousand pounds or more of a product at a time, effectively doing a job that would otherwise require a large amount of difficult work while also guaranteeing a uniform and productive flow of products on the production line. Bin unloaders are also designed to handle the product carefully so little damage to the product occurs. To learn more about how an automatic commodity unloader works, check out this video.

Technology will continue to develop and as this happens, we will continue to witness interesting trends in what certain commodities cost as a result. With innovation and technology also making a contribution to advances in handling, grading, and sorting of various products, the customer also benefits from higher quality at a cheaper price.

FruitTek offers automated systems for performing a variety of productive tasks in fruit and vegetable packing houses. Some of the packing solutions they offer include bin dumping systems, vision sorting lines, and fruit and vegetable washers and brushers. A video of one of their technologies can be viewed here.

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Source: http://www.aeronchairs.org.uk/2200/what-hot-wheels-and-bin-dumpers-can-teach-us-about-business-productivity/

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