Congratulations to AMT for Pentaho Excellence Award for Improved Customer Experience!

When I heard that AMT was awarded the Pentaho Excellence Award for Improved Customer Experience I thought it was well deserved and very cool!

I worked with the fantastic folks at AMT on MTInsight for 4 1/2 years and they are great team and it was my honor to be part of the development team. Here is the case study for AMT.

Congratulations to the entire MTInsight team!

Below is text at Pentaho's Excellen Awards site honoring AMT. 

Improved Customer Experience - AMT

When you see a tag that reads, “Made in America,” AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology probably had something to do with its creation. AMT is a trade association that represents and promotes U.S.-based manufacturing technology and its members – those who design, build, sell and service the continuously evolving technology at the heart of manufacturing. These 606 member companies have two main objectives in running their business: increasing sales and decreasing costs. One of the key ways AMT helps members accomplish this is through a business intelligence platform called MTInsight, which provides industry intelligence to help members position their business for success and make informed decisions. Prior to implementing Pentaho, members ran reports but had no mechanism to save their selections, and lost significant time spent on tedious efforts. Through the ingenuity of Pentaho’s Custom Visualization Team, AMT overcame these obstacles and improved user experience, with new visually appealing and easy to use dashboards. Moreover, Pentaho significantly reduced their BI tool costs. As a result of the decreased expenses related to the software running MTInsight, AMT can now offer free subscriptions to their data portal, rather than forcing the purchase of subscriptions to take advantage of benefits available within MTInsight.

Edstrom Family in Suite at Wizards-Celtics Win

I sold the two season tickets that I had for last night's game and purchased 5 seats for a lower level suite.  We had Suite 108 and below are some photos from last night's Wizards win versus the Celtics.  A great time was had by all.

Above is all five of us at the beginning of the game.

Below is Tim in the front of the suite where we had our own refrigerator, sink, stove and bathroom.

Above is (closest) Michael, John and Tim.

Above is the view from the Suite with John Wall with the ball.

Below is a happy group after a Wizards win and great time at a very nice suite.

Memex Automation Leadership Team Weekend

On Friday 19th we had a great Christmas Party for Memex Automation employees and on Saturday the 20th we spend a fantastic day in Toronto.  Huge thanks to Pauline and David McPhail for hosting all of us in Toronto for a absolutely great day!

Below are some photos from that very memorable day.

A few of us enjoyed some drinks at the Mill Street Brew Pub and then we all had lunch (above) in The Distillery District in Toronto at a very nice restaurant called Archeo. 

In the photo above are, clockwise from left, is Rick Mosca, Chief Operating Officer who also runs our Partner Program, Dr. Mary Saunders (John's wife), Julie Edstrom, Pauline McPhail, Linda Mosca, John Rattray, VP for Sales and Marketing, David McPhail President and CEO and me the Chief Technology Officer.  The four of us are the senior leadership team members for Memex Automation.

Above is the view from our seats at The Second City in Toronto.  This is the sister venue to the The Second City in Chicago and both are known for their impressive history of comics that started at Second City.

Above is one of the photos of some of the early players at Second City in Toronto. Some of the easy to recognize comics are Dan Akroyd at the bottom, John Candy at the upper left and Eugene Levy at the upper right.

Above is a photo looking through the glass floor at the top of the CN Tower in Toronto.

Below a few of us enjoyed a drink at the bar at the top of the CN tower after a great day.

Very Creative Snowblower Impeller Modification to Decrease Jammed 2nd Stages and Increase the Throw

I thought this was a very creative modification to any snowblower to radically cut down on heavy snow getting stuck in the impeller of the second stage. I use a Snow and Ice Teflon repellant spray by DuPont that keeps the snow from freezing to the side, but this is a better long term fix that SixtyFiveFord has come up with.

Thanks James Li - Outstanding Software Developer - Memex Automation's First Co-OP

This past Friday we were able to thank and recognize our very first software developer co-op student at Memex Automation, James Li, from the University of Waterloo. James is very bright and a gifted software developer.  Not only did he complete every task he was given ahead of schedule, these assignments were extremely well designed and written, but he did so with such enthusiasm that it was an absolute joy to have him on our team. 

James started for us this past fall in a full time co-op position as a software developer.  In the months that James was with the Memex Software Development Team, he managed to work on number of critical projects for us. James setup a new world-class continuous testing environment, created a configuration and capacity testing tool for MERLIN that allows us to properly gauge unlimited workloads as well as wrote numerous pieces of software for our future MERLIN 3.0 Manufacturing Executive System (MES) platform such as security modules, software metric widgets and many other impressive pieces of software.  




Above is the crystal globe that we had made for James and below is a closeup of text on the crystal base;





James Li is a talented young man and we very proud to say he was our first co-op at Memex Automation!

We started a new tradition - all co-ops have to go to Montana's restaurant and wear the horns after lunch :-)

From left to right below is Anusha, Terry, Brian, James, me, Ryan, Tim and Jeremy who are all part of the extremely talented software and hardware development team at Memex.

We also recognized James at our homepage at Memex Automation.

We wish him James all the best!  (And sincerely hope that he comes back full time!)