Academic literature on the topic 'Austin Logistics Inc. Solutions'

Purpose – The following paper is a “Q & A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The interviewee is Aldo Zini, President and CEO of Aethon, Inc., a robotics and software company that has developed an innovative automated platform to improve internal supply logistics. In this interview, Zini shares some of the technical and business details that have led up to the latest version of Aethon’s core product, the TUG, a mobile autonomous robot with more than 450 installs worldwide. Findings – Zini received a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in Public Management (Health Systems IT) from Carnegie Mellon University. While obtaining his BS degree, Zini did an internship in hospital consulting and became immediately interested in healthcare automation as a way to solve hospital inefficiencies. Zini went on to become the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Automated Healthcare, which developed the first robotic medication dispensing system for hospitals (ROBOT-Rx) and was acquired by McKesson for $67 million. Before joining and investing in Aethon, Zini was Senior Vice President of sales and marketing for TechRx, one of the largest providers of software solutions to the pharmacy industry, which was sold to NDC Corporation for over $200 million. Originality/value – Zini has been leading the technology revolution in hospital automation for more than 25 years. His contributions to technology-driven companies have led to acquisitions worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. Zini owns several patents in medication-dispensing technology, and is credited with the development of key methodologies in quantifying the value proposition for several technology platforms deployed in hundreds of hospitals across the country.

Jeffrey Stiles pondered these seemingly straightforward questions. As IT Director of Jagged Peak, Inc., a developer of e-commerce solutions located in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, it would be his responsibility to oversee the implementation of security measures that went beyond the existing user name and password currently required for each user. Recent events suggested that a move towards increased security might be inevitable. In just the past year, highly publicized security failures at the U.S. Department of Defense, major healthcare providers and large companies, such as Sony and JP Morgan Chase, had made executives acutely aware of the adverse consequences of IT system vulnerabilities. In fact, a study of business risk managers conducted in 2014 found that 69% of all businesses had experienced some level of hacking in the previous year. The nature of Jagged Peak’s business made the security of its systems a particular concern. The company, which had grown rapidly over the years, reporting over $61 million in revenue in 2014, provided its customers with software that supported web-based ordering, fulfillment and logistics activities, built around a philosophy of “buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere, return anywhere”. To support these activities, the company’s Edge platform needed to handle a variety of payment types, including gift cards (a recent target of hackers), as well as sensitive personal identifying information (PII). Compounding the security challenge: each customer ran its own instance of the Edge platform, and managed its own users. When only a single customer was being considered, the addition of further layers of security to authenticate uses was an eminently solvable problem. A variety of alternative approaches existed, including the use of various biometrics, key fobs that provided codes the user could enter, personalized security questions, and many others. The problem was that where multiple customers were involved, it was much more difficult to form a consensus. One customer might object to biometrics because it users lacked the necessary hardware. Another might object to security keys as being too costly, easily stolen or lost. Personalized questions might be considered too failure-prone by some customers. Furthermore, it was not clear that adding additional layers of authentication would necessarily be the most cost-effective way to reduce vulnerability. Other approaches, such as user training might provide greater value. Even if Stiles decided to proceed with additional authentication, questions remained. Mandatory or a free/added-cost option? Developed in house or by a third party? Used for internal systems only, customer platforms only, or both? Implementation could not begin until these broad questions were answered.

This year’s summit was unique given the COVID-19 pandemic: a major global outbreak that has imposed severe restrictions in all aspects of our life. At the outset, we were faced with three mutually exclusive options. First option was to cancel the summit in its entirety: this was the easiest and most obvious choice once the COVID-19 pandemic forced a near total lockdown all over the country with unprecedented disruptions of normal daily activities as the disease announced its thunderous touchdown on United States (US) soil. It was also the most-logical response faced with uncertainty regarding summit logistics and expected poor attendance due to the raging pandemic. Second option was to conduct a digital summit restricted to local audiences at Baylor College of Medicine: this option entailed implementing a virtual summit with attendance restricted to participants from our institution only. It sounded like a reasonable choice but that would impede the presence of diversity of topics, perspectives, insights and experiential learning opportunities, which are what render the summit exciting and worth attending. And finally, the last option was to conduct a digital unrestricted summit open to all interested audiences throughout the US. The conduct of a virtual summit open to all participants from around the country was initially considered daunting given the likelihood of amplified technical problems associated with an array of internet access differentials around the country, which would require a strong Information Technology (IT) presence throughout the sessions. Nonetheless, the attractiveness of going national with a virtual summit, despite the pandemic and logistical challenges, slowly gained converts and became the dominant choice. The response and level of participation in this first virtual summit showed an unanticipated surge despite the increase in registration fees to cover IT costs. This year, we had attendees from all regions of the US as well as from the United Kingdom. The range of topics was quite diverse encompassing health disparities in relation to cancers, nutrition, musculo-skeletal disorders, amputation rates, vaccination uptakes and COVID-19 infections. Various solutions were passionately presented to address these disparities including novel health technologies, community engagement and partnerships, improvement in health literacy and alternative therapeutics. There were no hitches despite the complex breakout sessions, and above all, attendees were satisfied and offered outstanding evaluation scores. This was definitely a summit that metamorphosed from pessimism to a triumphant success!
 
 Copyright © 2020 Salihu et al. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0)which permits unre-stricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in this journal, is properly cited.

Background: Emergency medical services (EMS) patients in respiratory distress require prompt rescue treatment. Only limited data describe the outcomes of prehospital rescue treatment with non-invasive positive pressure ventilation (NIPPV), including continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) or bilevel positive air pressure (BiPAP). We sought to characterize the outcomes of prehospital CPAP/BiPAP in a national EMS cohort. Methods: We analyzed 2018 cross-sectional data on 1289 EMS agencies from ESO Solutions, Inc. (Austin, Texas). We included adult (age ≥18 years) patients with respiratory distress (respiratory rate (RR) ≥30 breaths/min. We divided the patients between those receiving NIPPV and standard care (SC). The primary outcome was change in RR during EMS care. We censored the analysis at 40 minutes of treatment. We compared baseline characteristics between NIPPV and SC. Using mixed linear, fractional polynomial and multiple spline models, we determined the associations of prehospital NIPPV with changes in RR. Results: Of the 6,156,846 adult 911 cases, we included 87,219 with respiratory distress, including 11,271 (12.9%) NIPPV (11,206 CPAP and 65 BiPAP) and 75,948 (87.1%) SC. Median treatment duration were: NIPPV 20.0 minutes (IQR 13.5-29.2 minutes), SC 18.5 minutes (IQR 11.1-27.6 minutes). Common concurrent treatments for NIPPV and SC included: Albuterol (48.6%, 20.9%), Ipratropium (27.9%, 11.2%) and Methylprednisolone (23.7%, 7.8%). At 20 minutes, mean RR change was greater for SC than NIPPV; SC -7.8 breaths/min vs. NIPPV -6.0 breaths/min, difference 2.3 (95% CI 1.9-2.6), p<0.001. At 40 minutes, mean RR change was greater for SC than NIPPV; SC -9.5 breaths/min vs. NIPPV -8.2 breaths/min, difference 1.6 (95% CI 0.8 - 2.5), p<0.001. On linear mixed modeling adjusted for age, sex, incident location, race, ethnicity, agency type, initial RR, and medication use, SC was associated with a larger decrease in respiratory rate across time than NIPPV; [NIPPV X time] interaction p<0.001. Conclusions: In this multicenter series of prehospital respiratory distress, SC was associated with greater reductions in RR than NIPPV.

Austin Logistics Inc. Solutions provides tools that help centralize resource management, optimize and maintain compliance of calling schedules for consumer financial service organization (banks, financial institutions). With the increasing number of customers, the amount of rework and availability of resources had been notably decreasing over time; thereby negatively affecting the overall cost and quality of the software being delivered. The improvement objectives of the company and its departments were broadly stated but lacking a goal-driven nature. The software measurement Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach was chosen and used for this research initiative to better support business driven quality improvement. Software defect density data was collected and analyzed to identify significant deviations in the software development life cycle.. The results of the initial analysis on the transformed defect-tracking data helped identify the negatively affected areas within the software development life cycle. The data showed significant variations in the requirements, design and implementation phases of the product life cycle, thus helping identify various process improvement opportunities. On quantifying the change in defect density, the effectiveness of using GQM has also provided valuable insights for process improvement. Based on these results, we were able to identify some of the weaknesses and shortcomings in our application development process.<br>text

In July 2008, Sakhalin Energy Investment Company (SEIC) had successfully retrofitted its SALM system offshore Sakhalin Island in the Russian Sea of Okhotsk following its Universal Joint (Uni-joint) connection failure in November 2007. This SALM system is part of the “Vityaz” Production Complex in which the produced oil is exported from the Piltun-Astokhskoye-A platform via a subsea pipeline and the SALM to the Okha floating storage and offloading (FSO) unit for subsequent loading onto tankers for delivery to customers. Yearly oil production using the SALM system starts normally in June and lasts till December, during the ice free period. Full year round production were planned using a pipeline replacement for the SALM system (on-stream early 2008). However, in the interim period, there was a significant production opportunity if the SALM could be reinstalled in time for the summer 2008 ice-free season. Another significant incentive for SEIC was an early gas flow through the offshore pipelines to the Onshore Processing Facility for commissioning purposes, which expedites first gas delivery for the whole project by an estimated 4 months. In order to make this production season possible, a unique and fast track project to reinstate the SALM was necessary. SEIC, Shell International E&amp;P in Rijswijk and Single Buoy Moorings Inc. in Monaco, had jointly undertaken this project, incorporating proven engineering standards with an immense amount of creativity to meet these time constraints. The SALM project, that would normally take 2 years, has been hailed as a great success with design, fabrication and installation completed in just 7 months time. This paper describes the key challenges overcome to successfully deliver a fully working SALM system to an extreme time schedule. The emphasis is on a description of the technical challenges and the engineering repair solutions developed with reference to the constructibility, transportation, installation and operation. The challenges include: Re-engineering of the SALM Unijoint cast components to meet the limitations of the available foundries, implementation of a novel pull down installation method using a subsea linear winch, design and construction of independent contingency option, installation trials, worldwide logistics and project coordination. All these aspects form an integral part of the project execution strategy with prompt decision making to meet the required schedule.