My wife and I spent last weekend or Labor Day weekend in Sawyer Michigan. Although I have lived here in the states for almost 20 years now, I cannot help but notice the differences between how "production" (collective term) works between here and the Philippines. (I wanted to post photos of my wife shopping at the fruit stand but I lost those digital photos. That is a whole different story.)
This fruit stand was not manned, sat in a corner of a street, in a private property. It had a wooden cash box (i.e., cash and check payment only), chained to the structure. It had three security cameras (more than likely with motion detector), one of which had a short antenna (I can only imagine it works off 802.11 protocol). I noticed that the power adaptors were plugged to an outlet and did not seem secure (someone can just unplug them, if someone really intended to abscond the fruits, vegetables, organic honey, and the cash box). On a white board, the following works were scribed: "Smile, you are on candid camera. Thou shall not steal."
Where is this all leading to? What I can conclude are the following. Any production business process that can be automated or outsourced, whereby there is significant cost savings to labor cost--such solution needs to be examined and implemented. A lot of our economic "transaction" is based on honesty. (A fudged resume can be discovered. A dishonest time sheet will be caught. A dishonest tax return will be audited. A substandard part replacement discovered. This is very true in the US. Sadly, I cannot speak the same about the Philippines. It may be different now.) Thus, such automation and BPO (business process outsourcing) ought not to be ruled out when trying to cut production cost. Then again, this might be stating what is now too obvious.
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