Date
Fri, 27 Oct 2017
Time
10:00 - 11:00
Location
L3
Speaker
Padraig Regan
Organisation
StayLinked

In certain business environments, it is essential to the success of the business that workers stick closely to their plans and are not distracted, diverted or stopped. A warehouse is a great example of this for businesses where customers order goods online and the merchants commit to delivery dates.  In a warehouse, somewhere, a team of workers are scheduled to pick the items which will make up those orders and get them shipped on time.  If the workers do not deliver to plan, then orders will not be shipped on time, reputations will be damaged, customer will be lost and companies will go out of business.

StayLinked builds software which measures what these warehouse workers do and measures the factors which cause them to be distracted, diverted or stopped.  We measure whenever they start or end a task or process (e.g. start an order, pick an item in an order, complete an order). Some of the influencing factors we measure include the way the worker interacts with the device (using keyboard, scanner, gesture), navigates through the application (screens 1-3-4-2 instead of 1-2-3-4), the performance of the battery (dead battery stops work), the performance of the network (connected to access point or not, high or low latency), the device types being used, device form factor, physical location (warehouse 1, warehouse 2), profile of worker, etc.

We are seeking to build a configurable real-time mathematical model which will allow us to take all these factors into account and confidently demonstrate a measure of their impact (positive or negative) on the business process and therefore on the worker’s productivity. We also want to alert operational staff as soon as we can identify that important events have happened.  These alerts can then be quickly acted upon and problems resolved at the earliest possible opportunity.

In this project, we would like to collaborate with the maths faculty to understand the appropriate mathematical techniques and tools to use to build this functionality.  This product is being used right now by our customers so it would also be a great opportunity for a student to quickly see the results of their work in action in a real-world environment.

Please contact us with feedback and comments about this page. Last updated on 03 Apr 2022 01:32.