I ordered some take-out the other day from a local, but popular, Mexican Restaurant called Los Hermanos Mexican Restaurant. Their food is decent, but their service is a mess.

I called-in an order of two meals and some chips. The lady who took my order was nice and she said I could come and pick up my order in 30 minutes. When I arrived at Los Hermanos Mexican Restaurant in Lindon, Utah and Los Hermanos Mexican Restaurant in Provo, Utah, that’s when all the service defects were exposed. Below is a process map that I quickly built to familiarize you with the take-out process:

Keep Reading [713 words, 1 image & 2:51 Average Reading Time]

There a blog tag game going around and I’ve been tagged by John Hunter and by Chris Knudsen. This game is somewhat narcissistic, but I’ll play along.

Here are five things you probably wish you didn’t know about me:

1. I was an amateur-sponsored skateboarder, sponsored by Concrete Jungle, an old school San Francisco Skate Company.
2. I grew up poor; very, very poor.
3. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.
4. During the day, my mind is occupied with thoughts of developing new technologies, new businesses, and various jui-jitsu and muay thai moves against imaginary opponents.

Keep Reading [177 words, 0 images & 42 sec. Average Reading Time]

I took my 7 and 9 year old kids snowboarding last week. It was a lot of fun. We went to Park City, Utah — all three of us have season passes there. I enrolled the kids in an all-day session. Park City has a 1:5 ratio for teachers to students and, fortunately, the kids’ class only had 4 kids and their instructor was very cool and very good at teaching. At the end of the day, I caught up with the kids and they were riding down the hill well. I was a proud dad. Next time, probably next week, the kids and I will be hanging on the mountain snowboarding together. I can’t wait.

Keep Reading [207 words, 1 image & 50 sec. Average Reading Time]

I’ll be teaching at BYU’s Business School as an Adjunct Professor. I’ll be teaching BUSM 361, Operations and Supply Chain Management. I’m excited to do this; it’ll only be part-time, 8AM - 9:20AM, on Tuesday and Thursday. This is somewhat of a recreational activity for me, while I keep my “real” job. I’m excited to be teaching.

Below is a rough list of topics that I’ll cover in the class:

CREATING VALUE THROUGH OPERATIONS AND SUPPLY CHAINS

• Introduction to Operations and Supply Chain Management
• Operations and Supply Chain Strategies
• Business Processes

Keep Reading [247 words, 0 images & 59 sec. Average Reading Time]

It’s critically important in any transaction to be able to answer the question “where’s my stuff” or “where are we in the process?” This requirement is often referred to as Traceability and Visibility; sometimes, people refer to this overall process as Click-to-Ship.

Almost all transactions have Traceability and Visibility as a requirement. From the customer’s perspective, they ought and need to know the status of the transaction. The company, then, needs to provide feedback and status to the customer whenever she needs it. Take, for example, the following transaction types:

Keep Reading [713 words, 1 image & 2:51 Average Reading Time]

14 influential bloggers were invited to Microsoft headquarters this week to interview Bill Gates. Niall Kennedy, one of the invited bloggers asked some hard question about Microsoft, Patents, and Novell. Below is the transcript and notice Bill’s short quip on Utah.

Note — There’s more substance than the Utah quip below, but the Utah comment is just the fun part; the rest is factual and informative, but not as fun:

+++++

Niall:

Keep Reading [629 words, 0 images & 2:31 Average Reading Time]

Google came out today with a click-fraud report, claiming that less than 2% of all clicks on both adwords and adsense are considered click-fraud. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Product Manager on Google’s Trust and Safety Team, claims that this is true because of Google’s 4-step filtering system.

According to Ghosemanjumder, below is an accurate picture of click-fraud and invalid clicks based on Googler’s internal data:

Google uses a 4-step filtering system, as pictured below:

In Ghosemajumder’s words:

Keep Reading [817 words, 3 images & 3:16 Average Reading Time]

Ever since we adopted, I’ve been staying up late through the night on a daily schedule of feeding and changing diapers every 2 hours. In those early morning hours, I’ve spent a lot of time watching the Food Network. No, I’m not a good cook or anything, but I sure love to watch others cook. Occasionally, I’ll cook and I enjoy it, but I’m no good.

Out of curiousity, I wanted to learn a little bit behind The Food Network. So, I checked out the Business Plan Archives to see if there was anything on Food.com — and, there was.

Keep Reading [1326 words, 3 images & 5:18 Average Reading Time]