Life On A Barge January 12, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.Tags: Barges, Tools, Users
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My company ships some of our products by barge, up and down the Mississippi river. When you ship things by barge, people are naturally inclined to ask things like “Where is my barge?” Answering that question is more difficult than you might think.
Barges are extremely low-tech devices. They are nothing more than an enormous steel bucket, floating in the river. They are moved about by tugboats, and a single tug can have as many as 30 barges lashed to it as it moves up and down the river. Sometimes a barge will break loose and float away, coming to rest in some nook or cranny of the mighty Mississippi. Most barges are owned by a few companies, and you rent your barges from one of these companies. You might rent a barge for a single trip, or for many trips over a period of time.
Being a technology kind of guy, I had an instant answer for the barge question. Just attach a GPS transmitter to each barge, and collect position data in real time. Put a snazzy web site in front of the data, enable authorized user access, and you’re good to go!
(This was a few years ago, so these days I’d include a barge Twitter stream, a barge blog or two, a barge-cam streaming live to Hulu, and an app [iBarge?] so you can track a barge from your iPhone. If there was time, maybe even an app that would identify a barge using a picture you snapped from the shore using your phone. Not to mention a search engine that looks for #barge hashtags on Twitter and aggregates them, along with matching Flickr barge photos, on trackmybarge.com. Web 2.0 really enhances the whole barge management experience in ways that Mark Twain could only dream of.)
I pitched this plan to the barge people, and the idea quickly sank. First, barges have no power source. This meant that the GPS unit had to be battery powered with solar charging panels. Second, barges get banged around a lot, so the unit had to be hardened and waterproof, and would need to be welded somewhere on the top edge of the barge. The rough estimate for such a unit was $1,000 each, which worked out to a $1,000,000 investment to outfit a fleet of 1,000 barges. This didn’t include the whole web and data infrastructure, or programming effort. (Not to mention the blogs, webcams, and Facebook app that would soon follow.)
A bit miffed, I aked how they currently track the barges. Easy: each morning a clerk calls each of our tugboat pilots on their cellphone. She asks them where they are, and they reply with a mile number on the river. She knows which barges are tied to each tug, and she writes each barge number and the mile marker on an index card that she puts on a bulletin board in the office. If you want to know where the barges are you, you can stop by the board or call her.
Just as importantly, the pilots like to be called each morning. It’s nice to hear from the home office, and a friendly voice on the phone is a pleasant way to start each day.
The clerk makes $25,000 a year. My solution pays for itself in 40 years. Analysis over; project cancelled.
As we get completely wrapped up in applying technology to everything we encounter, it helps to remember that some things work fine just as they are. And in the end, processes that work because people like to hear each other’s voices are probably worth keeping, even if only for a little while longer.
The Effective CIO 
This really IS a great post Chuck! We’re working with a fire department right now who is trying to figure out ways they can use technololgy to track fires, and like the barges, they’ll have to have hardened technology and make a large investment up front to move away for their paper based solution. I’ll certainly keep this post in mind as we move forward!
A career of tracking military ships, submarines, acft and high other high interest items both through manual means and through technical means the skillsets of collectors and the focus of the information shifted from the business of our business to deconflicting technology and briefing systems status. While everyone has a common picture few can tell the significance behind the information displayed. More times than not Technology, People and Process have their place. the trick is getting the right mix.
You are correct that the ROI does not close on a $1K device to get daily barge location. However, lets look at the analogy of the long haul trucking fleets and how they utilize the a $1K device to get not only information on the location, but status of the cab and trailer systems, condition of the load, paperwork reduction for the driver etc.
Instead of mounting the device on the barge put it on the tug (lots of expensive electronics already in the pilot house) and associate the barge number to that tug at the start of a journey.
By now, I presume the tugs are being tracked by GPS. This helps, but barges spend a lot of time detached from tugs, sitting at a dock somewhere. They also have an annoying tendency to float away every now and then, hiding in some obscure corner of the river for a long time before anyone comes across them.
Probably a better solution would be something like the SPOT devices used by backpackers. They send an intermittent location ping to a satellite receiver that can be tracked on a web site. This kind of device could ping once or twice a day and probably run off a battery for a month if designed properly. Maybe my trackmybarge.com idea will happen after all!
You guys missed out on barges. Try going back some 70 years ago and look at what took place on barges. I have a web site about barges somewhat at usmmv.blogspot.com. We were a group of about 30,000 seamen, some elderly and disabled, some school children and some were women. Look at that lifestyle and try to put your self in their shoes if you want to know about barges. Just a thought.
jdonhorton