Garbage has a significant status in our life. In essence, if we need air and water to live, then we need to remove garbage to have a good life. Every day, we shed off garbage from our office, home, recreational or public places. Now, many businesses are springing out with innovative ideas to use the garbage as a raw material to run sustainable business. Whether future holds any promise for these kinds of businesses is still a question. One idea to use garbage is still explored.  And I am going to delve on it.  I like to call it “Garbage Incubator”.

The idea is simple – a personal garbage incubator where we can dump our daily garbage and we get bio-fuel out of it in a can or bottle. The same bio-fuel can be used to food preparation or run generator. The countries like India and China could see a vast usefulness. We could have community installing garbage incubator that could take garbage from many households and gives out the bio-fuel based on the percent of garbage contributed by the household. Then, much family will rely less on Kerosene oil to light lamp or grill. Interesting, isn’t it!! How about use garbage to get car fuel for next day. Chevron or Shell will kill this idea. And we don’t need Iran’s or Venezuela’s oil. Well, that’s more political.

This idea, beyond its extreme and undeniable utility, is suffered from many issues. Of course, the time to get the bio-fuel is important and accordingly the garbage will be dumped. For example, if it takes 8 hrs to get 1 liter of bio-fuel, then people will use the system accordingly by putting the garbage in the night and have the fuel available in the morning. I know, considerable advancement has been done to come up with specific bacteria to decompose the garbage faster. Since all garbage is not disposable, this leads us to another problem – maintaining machine and residual removal. Due to foul smell, people may stop using the system. So the garbage incubator must be tightly packed. When opened, it should not emit any sought of smell. Also, for small fee, someone can be hired to remove the residuals from the garbage incubator and clean it every now or then. Another challenge is really a big one. How to use the fuel for cooking?  For that, a cooking grill needs to be designed specifically to take the bio-fuel can. The garbage incubator will dispense out a can of bio-fuel and then that bio-fuel can will fit in to the newly designed cooking gas.

There are many problems with this idea, but the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages. The cut in the utility expense or using this fuel to light house or may use this fuel in your car may be huge.

 ERP ( Enterprise Resource Planning) and BI ( Business Intelligence) have helped many corporations achieved unimaginable heights. With integral mantra of innovation, productivity and cutting waste, many businesses are competing nose-to-nose in the global platform. After a decade of growth in ERP and BI stream and saturation of same basic ERP/BI usage, many business are looking for some miraculous advancement in this field. And I, for one, believe that the game is not over yet. Every advancement in IT technology showcases more room for improvement. Being worked on many ERPs, BIs, and other state-of-art software products, I can generally discuss about the lack of sufficiency and vision for new opportunities from a vantage point.

One area where any technology firm can take a giant leap is the availability of real-time information. Due to complex integration of many IT systems, the real-time data availability has taken a back seat. As a result, some of the business areas, where the real-time solutions can potentially bring big saving or revenue, are silent and waiting for resurrection. For example, when a transportation division in a manufacturing firm sends a load tendering ( quote for the transportation fee) to potential transport vendors, they have to wait from 3 hrs to a day. In the world of lean manufacturing, that time is considered a waste. And if we need to resend another quote in response to the counter-offer from the transport vendors, it limits the choice resulting in overpaying of transportation fee. On the other hand, a common console can be used among the companies. The customers will feed in the general information like the product size, dimensions,etc , which is generally available with the companies. The transport companies can create à la carte of transportation choices and can also decide to link the price with the market fuel price or tax that can always gives the right price. Well, the potential is unlimited. When a transportation guy in a manufacturing firm wants to find the potential vendors, the console can give the information instantly.

Take another example. A purchasing agent wants to find the lowest price of a raw material. In a fast growing company, some raw materials are very crucial to the product and the price of them are also depend on the fuel, import-export constraint,etc. In my company, resin is one such example. A console like above can help find the right vendors within the desired price. Also, in the event of market fluctuation, it would be much easier to change the vendor without delaying the manufacturing time. What a deal!!!

But there are many challenges in creating this console. Or should I say opportunities!!!  For example, the vendors will be wary about the breach,which reveal the price to the competitors.  Also, not every company can agree to share the product information for the same reason. So the companies will be apprehensive of putting the product information . In all, security plays a very important role and a robust struture needs to be created. Secondly, not every company can have a system to support the console. An online console , through managed service, can solve this problem. Finally, one of the biggest challenge in the implementation of console is feeding it with companies’s product information. In this fast growing world, companies’ business model changes quickly. Hence, an integrated solution ( or interface in term of IT) would be requied that is independent of ERP and could grab information based on the specification of the ERP. This interface can compromise the time. So more research should be done to overcome this hurdle.

Disclaimer: The idea should not be used for any commercial or personal purpose without my prior knowledge.