Hi all, this is my first post and I want to share how Google can support me during my job; I’m a consultant in logistics (warehouse, transport, etc), I’ve a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification and customers ask me to optimize their processes, in order to achieve better productivity.
One of the tools we can use is called “spaghetti chart”, because it represents the movements of person (or machines) in a map; normally this drawing is done by hand, like in the following examples:
The exercise is a little bit boring and it takes a lot of time; that’s why I found another way to do it: with a GPS, if the activity is done externally or if the roof allows the GPS to receive satellite signal.
Just using a normal Garmin GPS (in this case a Garmin Edge 800) we can “track” all the movement done by the person and then represents them on a map… of course Google Maps or Google Earth!
In this first example we used Google Earth and we “overlapped” the layout of customer’s warehouse to the tracks of two machines, working at the same time in the same area:
We can easily understand which is the area with more traffic and thus more risk of accident…
In this other example we represent the activity of transport of goods from the warehouse to the area of stock and then container load:
Then using the free software Basecamp of Garmin, we can have a look at the speed and other useful information as time of movement, length of the journey, average speed:
I hope that you can useful this post, and if you want to ask me questions or remarks, please feel free to write me!
Alberto