Re: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps -- MIDRANGE-L

Two factors I have seen that prohibit PCs on the production floor are:

1) A hostile environment.  This includes air quality, temperature 
controls, near-by moving objects from fork lifts to thrown packages, and 
workers with no love for the company or its property.

2) Lost production while people use the PCs to play games, do personal 
stuff, and spend company time to make a case for an Internet connection 
so they can download porn, music, and surf to e Bay.

Until that changes, I can not see durable and cheap terminals 
disappearing. In fact, I would expect the direction to be toward more 
text-based stuff with bar code readers, RF ID, and all sorts of hand 
held devices.

------

It already has changed.

We've never gone past simple keyboard covers in any floor location, and
those PCs last the same 5 years or so that the one's in the office do. The
rest is a personnel issue that has nothing to do with the equipment. Why any
company would tolerate vandalism, deliberate, or negligent, by its employees
is beyond me, but to each their own.

Don't get me wrong, I know that some work environments are far more hostile
than others, but I'd wager that in the majority of cases where it is safe
for a worker to stay in an area for extended periods, that a PC will be just
fine.

Our users can only access the web sites we want them to, and can only run
the software we want them to as well. It can be as simple as just using the
host and route tables on the individual PCs, to running company wide
proxies. They can't play games, or download anything, because their PCs are
locked down tight. That process takes all of 10 minutes to complete and is
built right in to every version of windows released since win95.

And yes, the craftier ones probably could circumvent those things, but so
what? That again is a personnel issue, not an IT problem. As far as we're
concerned, we can report on what the users do or don't do, management can
decide which of those things is appropriate and what they want to do about
the ones that aren't.

We *do* have RF handhelds on the floor, and we *do* process most everything
via barcode scanning, but we still have many functions requiring a PC in
closer proximity to the work areas. (Travel time is the #1 king of all
productivity killers IMHO.) Everything from our iSeries, to customer web
portals that must be accessed in realtime, to mundane things like
shipment/maintenance checklists, attendance spreadsheets, etc, etc. 

PCs are *very* simple (and cheap) to RF enable as well, so they are all
portable without time consuming, and costly, cabling installations. As long
as they can find an outlet or drag over an extension cord, they're all ready
to go.

We still have a couple of dumb terminals here, since we chose to stick with
twinax consoles, but even they will likely go away with the next upgrade
cycle. And other than those two, I can't think of a single convincing reason
why we would ever install more of them.