We keep reading of the lack of people in the fast food industry. This is due to the Covid pandemic, the pay rate and other external factors. Robotics has been hugely influential in the automotive and other manufacturing industries for some time. We have even seen it enter the serving industry with robots delivering food in restaurants and hospitals. But now meet Flippy, Flippy is the robotic french fry cooker that works 23 hours a day, 7 days a week without a bathroom or meal break. It gets a one hour maintenance and clean-up break every day. It just works and works and works. This Flippy works at a White Castle fast food restaurant in Merrillville, Indiana. I remember White Castle's from the early 1950's, long before McDonalds ever reared its Goliath like head. A great article in today's Wall Street Journal on Flippy by Christopher Mims is excellent. Robotics, Automation and Artificial Intelligence is the future. Get ready for it. Over time, it will speed-up the process of absorbing low paying unfilled jobs.
Yes, this post will be primarily a copy of a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. The article is the point of this blog. Over my decades in consulting, one of the major requirements in our niche was to insure that our clients received the savings we had forecast that they would achieve in a mutually agreeable manner. In the very beginning, when I started back in 1974, computers were not easily available or accessible as they had to be huge room-size machines and many clients did not even have them. So we used adding machines with paper tape to the shortly thereafter personal hand held-calculators. Personal computers starting with the very first Apple or Radio Shack model proved far superior but had minimal calculating capacity. None were perfect and because of this limitation, a straight line average over a years period was typically used to compare history to current and prove savings had been achieved. I found well into my career that straight-line bases had fallacies in the
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