Cutting Labor Costs

One of the major costs in industrial organizations is not the cost of people to run equipment (which is becoming increasingly automated) but in "overhead" labor costs in activities, such as:

1. Manually filling out a paper form that someone else manually enters into a computer to track operations
2. Manually entering duplicate data entry into multiple systems
3. Spending time trying to find the status of a customer order to ensure on-time delivery.
4. Time spent in coordination and planning meetings and related activities.
5. Time spent capturing and sharing data to meet regulatory requirements for supply chain materials traceability
6. Time spent fixing mistakes and late delivery problems
7. Time spent trying to figure out why and where you are losing money.

By automating these processes, KnarrTek can save its clients between one and four (or more) full-time equivalent employees at a loaded labor cost of $60,000 per year or more each. This is at a typical first year cost of $20,000 to $50,000 and then a recurrent cost of under $1,000/month.

KnarrTek is able to do this by using its own software platforms, which provide over 90% of the needed code for these applications prebuilt or automatically generated:

• BellHawk, which performs job, inventory, asset, and work-in-process tracking plus warehouse management and materials tracking and traceability functions using barcode, RFID and mobile computing technologies. BellHawk also prints barcode labels on demand, which can be serialized and/or customized to each specific situation. Because it is based on a rules-based expert system BellHawk can be readily configured for a wide range of applications, including generating real-time warnings for impending operational mistakes.
• MilramX, which uses an intelligent agent paradigm to automatically share information between different departments within an organization and with the organization's  supply-chain trading partners. MilramX is also used for decision support, monitoring multiple sources of data in near real-time and alerting people when there are situations to which they need to pay attention.