inbound
We were flipping through our local newspaper not long ago
when we read this headline: “Storage for the creepy and quirky:
Warehouse 13.” With a title like that, we thought, this story will
be right up our alley.
But instead of an article about a distribution center or some
offbeat material handling solution, it turned out to be a review
of a new SyFy cable TV series. “Warehouse 13” is a fictional
building in South Dakota’s Badlands where the U.S. government has been secretly storing famous objects, like Harry
Houdini’s wallet, John Dillinger’s gun, and Paul Revere’s
lantern, that seem to have some sort of mysterious power. (Tag
line: “If it’s causing trouble out there, it belongs in here.”) In the
first episode, Secret Service agents must find missing objects
and return them to the warehouse shelves before they wreak
supernatural havoc.
As you might expect, the facility manager doesn’t use ordinary methods for getting around Warehouse 13; a zip line takes
him swiftly past endless rows of shelving. Hmmm … we think
that would be much more fun than a narrow-aisle truck. ;
warehouse of the weird
no longer lost in translation
planes, trains, and Lego-mobiles
If you have kids at home, you probably also have Lego
bricks, the colorful plastic blocks used by youngsters the
world over to build vehicles, robots, and the like.
As we recently discovered at www.lego.com,
Lego bricks aren’t just for children. There are
plenty of adults who enjoy designing and
building unique and complex creations—
including freight trains, airplanes, ships, and material handling equipment.
If you’re into intermodal transportation, you’ll enjoy the
10170 TTX Intermodal Double-Stack Car and the 7898 Cargo
Train Deluxe RC Train Set. You’ll also want to check out the
International Lego Train Club Organization ( www.iltco.org). If
you’re more of a jet-setter, take a look at the Model 7734 Cargo
Plane. For a more down-to-earth experience, the Model 7733
truck set includes a European-style tractor pulling doubles; a
forklift pulls up alongside to load crates and pallets into the
curtain-sided trailers. And for those seafarers among you, try
6186 Build Your Own Lego Harbor, complete with a container
ship, shoreside crane, and containers (sold out when we last
checked, alas).
Warehouse wonks haven’t been forgotten: They can play with
the 8290 Mini Forklift, which boasts a working mast and forks,
or visit the Lego Group’s Web site ( www.lego.com) to view
examples of Lego enthusiasts’ own designs for cranes, telescopic handlers, and other heavy equipment.
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PHOTO COUR TESY OF THE LEGO GROUP
For many exporters, global trade management (GTM) software has made short
work of the once time-consuming denied-and restricted-party screening process,
freeing staffers from the task of checking
outgoing shipments against lengthy government lists of parties barred from
importing U.S. goods. But even with automated screening, errors sometimes occur
because of problems with transliteration.
Transliteration problems can arise when
a foreign name contains letters or characters not used in English, forcing the software to “translate” that letter or character
into something roughly equivalent. But
different transliterations may produce
alternate spellings, which means that a
name may appear in different forms on
the various lists and/or on the exporter’s
own documents. Consider the following
example, provided by Anne van de
Heetkamp, director of global trade compliance for GTM software developer
TradeBeam. An exporter receives an order
from a German buyer who spells his name
Michael Grüße on the purchase order.
Because that name contains a character
that doesn’t occur in English, Grüße could
show up on restricted-party lists as
Grusse, Grüsse, or Gruesse. If the exporter
uses a spelling that’s different from what’s
shown on a list, the screening software
may not make the necessary match.
TradeBeam says it has come up with a
solution. The company recently released
version 3.5 of its GTM software, which
offers new features to address such lan-guage-matching problems. According to
van de Heetkamp, the software’s enhanced
Western European language handling
improves the translation and matching of
words that use characters—including
accents and other marks—that may
appear in variant forms in English-lan-guage restricted-party lists. The new
release also accommodates Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean,
whose complex writing systems include
thousands of characters. ;
