Every carwash owner is looking for a system that is fully automatic and robotic for their tunnel carwash so that they do not have to do any pre-prep washing. If you ever go to a fully robotic carwash you might notice before the car goes in there is someone there with a little pressure washer, a brush and a soap mitt getting the car ready to go through the tunnel.

The first time you see this you think yourself why is that person there? Shouldn’t the automatic carwash be good enough to clean the car without any human labor? Well that is the dig really; the truth is no, most of them can't. It is unfortunate that robotic carwash cleaning equipment costs so much and does not fully clean the car properly. If the carwash owners do not pre-prep the car then there will be customer complaints.

Of course if they do prep the car prior to wash it slows the speed, cuts down the volume of cars that can be washed in the day and changes the consistency of each car washed due to the human element. All this is true of course however, not all cars are created equally. Consider if you will that every car has different bodylines and the robotic carwash system may not be able to get to everything.

Those hard to get to spots can be cleaned in advance and pre-prepped prior to entering the tunnel carwash. There is somewhat of a debate that goes on in the industry, as to whether carwash owners should pre-prepped the cars.

But in the end if the car is not clean enough the customer is not happy and therefore they will not return and you will eventually go into business for not enough customers or get a bad reputation and the competition will end up smoking you in the market place.

For the last 25 years, the metal injection molding industry has grown at a steady rate. In the 70s it was predicted that the MIM process would grow at the rate of 18 to 22% per year. But because of some challenges with the materials, known as feedstocks in the industry, the initial growth was slow. Typically feedstocks were mixed by the individual companies involved in making metal injection molded components. The inconsistency in the mixing of the feed stocks led to part variation that was unacceptable in a wide variety of precision applications.

As more and more components were designed using the metal injection molding process, larger manufacturers became interested in developing feed stocks. Two major players were Allied Bendix and BASF. This enabled companies without metallurgists and large technical staffs to become involved in the process. The number of companies producing metal injection molded parts grew.

Then with the advancement in digital process controls, processing equipment became more exacting with greater process control. Now, plastic injection molding machines and furnaces are able to produce complex shapes with greater consistency.

So what types of components are good candidates for the metal injection molding process? The answer to that is it depends upon the configuration of the part. But in general terms, if a part can be plastic injection molded, it can be metal injection molded (as long as the part does not have any undercuts).

A wide variety of materials can be molded. Carbon, alloy and stainless steels are molded day in and day out with titanium catching up quick. Lots of development is being done with titanium for medical devices.

The industries using a lot of MIM components are firearms, medical device, dental equipment and electronics. Most of the parts are relatively small, less than 1 1/2" in length. But we have molded parts 7" long.

Even though most materials have 18% shrink, dimensions are very consistent. Tolerances can be held to plus or minus .001 for small critical dimensions.

Most public and private entities today are trying to promote “Green” processes as a way of doing business to help the environment or are touting their “green” attitudes to improve their corporate image. Common examples may include using recycled copier paper, buying items with a minimum percentage of post-consumer waste, and encouraging recycle programs for their own waste. While all those methods are valid, implementation can be very costly and may prevent the programs from being successful and widely accepted. What some “Green” coordinators do not realize is that utilizing and implementing technology solutions that eliminate waste can be just as good or better.

The common misconception is that technology equals huge dollar expenditures and long implementation schedules that may cost more than they are worth. This may be true in some cases, but not for electronic reverse auctions. Public and private entities can save thousands of dollars and trees every year by posting their bids online in either a reverse auction format or electronic RFQ, The specifications and terms and conditions documents can be uploaded to a website so they do not have to be printed out every time a request for them is made. The vendors can then respond to these bids by uploading their responses or placing bids during the live reverse auction.

Hard dollar savings can be achieved by both parties by reducing the amount of paper, the mailing costs associated with issuing bids and responding to them, and the time it takes to process and report paper bid results. With an electronic bidding process, bids documents can be uploaded and results can be instantly reported on and saved without ever having to print anything on a piece of paper.

Reverse auctions with http://www.eDynaQuote.com are easy to implement since you do not have to download anything to your computer to use them. This means that your IT department does not have to dedicate any resources to maintain your account. All documents and completed event results are archived in your account or can be saved in electronic format on your computer. We also offer many flexible and customizable payment options for your convenience.

Is it possible to run a company in today’s business climate without taking the cut-throat, winner-take-all approach that seems so predominant? While all the big news lately has been about those companies that have failed, and particularly those that have failed while using questionable tactics and obfuscating accounting practices, not to mention showing little concern for the average employee, are there still companies thriving while being run in a fashion that recognizes the value of ethics and the contribution of employees who feel like family?

One example that comes to mind here close to home is Celestial Seasonings. In spite of the various changes the company has undergone over the last 15 years, including a stint as a Kraft subsidiary, a time as an independent company, and now as part of a larger health-food company, Celestial Seasonings has stayed true to its roots. The company treats employees honestly and with kindness, and shares the profits of its success with them. It is a company that seems to wish everyone it touches—vendors, distributors, customers, even the competition—to benefit from that contact.

So it seems that it is possible to run a company in such a fashion that employee loyalty is bred by good treatment, that strong financial results can be achieved without scams or accounting schemes. Why don’t more companies try it?

My theory is that too many of the executives today were trained early in their careers that stepping on others to get where you want to be is not just expected—it is the only way to get to the top. Now that they have reached the goal, they are not easily convinced that a different strategy might work equally well.

The good news is, the change is coming. It is coming not from the senior people, but from junior execs who are coming of age in a different time. More and more, people are coming to the realization that what we do affects everyone else, and the ‘everyone else’ is not ‘them’. It is ‘us’. We are all in this together, and the dawning awareness of that fact is what will drive a sea change in our world over the next few generations.

Our planet is gradually recovering from centuries of abuse at the hands of uncaring and ignorant populations. As we take better care of Mother Earth, the chances of our race surviving another century rise slowly. And much of the recovery will be the responsibility of the businesses of the planet. Governments can spend huge sums to clean up past ecological disasters and can legislate proper behavior, but business is best equipped to prevent it in the first place. If the top management of a company has the attitude that taking shortcuts and violating either our home or the people who live here is the worst possible path to take, this gradual improvement in conditions will snowball with lightning speed.

My vision is not one that will easily come to pass. On the other hand, Mo Seigel probably had little inkling of what Celestial Seasonings would become when he and some friends picked herbs in the fields outside Boulder to use in his first batch of Mo’s 36 Herb Tea back in 1969. Vision is not about the ‘how’ of it. The realization of a dream seems to take care of itself when people come together to share the dream. As more and more of us come to share this vision, we take another step toward it becoming reality. We make it our reality.

I’m doing a sales turnaround assessment and planning project right now for a company that’s lost a large percentage of it’s sales in the last year. The CEO has come to us and asked us to help him devise a strategy to quickly get revenues back up to their previous levels. The company is losing money and while it has scaled back on it’s employee headcount and other costs, it’s still struggling to get close to breaking even. The company needs an immediate sales fix.

As most people know, there is no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to boosting revenues and accelerating sales. It takes time to design and execute a sales turnaround strategy. A lot of time the sales cycle itself can be the biggest impediment. Even when management knows what to do and how to do it, it still takes time to boost your top line revenues. Even worse, when management is either in denial about the sales problem or waiting, wishing and hoping for things to improve on their own, often times they will wait until the situation is unsolveable.

If your company is losing money and losing its sales momentum, don’t wait until it is too late to bring in an outside resource to diagnose and fix the problem.

If your organization has field sales personnel spread across the country or across the globe, it’s very important that you provide them with the time, attention, and management that is required in order to make them effective. We see lots of organizations that hire expensive field sales personnel only to leave them to their own devices and provide them with little supervision, guidance, mentoring, or coaching. This is a serious mistake.

Here are some suggested things that you can think about in order to effectively manage your remotely-based sales people.

First of all, plan to spend regular time in their territory visiting customers with them. If you are not the person to do this directly, make sure that you have a sales manager or other members of your management team who can do this. A good sales person, no matter how senior, should have someone from the head office or from management visiting customers at least once every quarter.

Second of all, schedule regular sales meetings in order to bring your field sales people together. I suggest at least once a quarter if not once a month. This will give you the opportunity to train them, stay in touch with them, work through problems or issues with them, and provide an active level of supervision and engagement to them that helps them to be more successful. We see many companies cutting their sales meeting budgets trying to improve their overall expenses in sales and marketing, but sometimes when it comes to cutting sales meetings this can really mean that they’re being penny wise and pound foolish.

Third, make sure that you schedule regular conference calls and telephone calls with your sales people to get updates. I suggest as a sales manager that if you’re not talking to your field sales people at least every few days if not every week, then you’re really not doing your job. Sales people need to have active communication with their supervisors. Some companies leave these people to their own devices and it just doesn’t make sense.

Fourth, make sure you get yourself a good CRM system that gives you the opportunity to measure and monitor the activity and the performance of your sales people from remote locations. I suggest salesforce.com but there are lots of online web-based CRM tools today that can easily allow you to see what your sales people are doing and how they’re spending their days in real time.

Fifth, make sure that you just take an active interest in building a relationship with each of your field sales personnel. If you’re going to hire these expensive people you simply cannot afford to neglect them. Yet I see many companies who deploy sales personnel and simply leave them alone. This isn’t a good idea.

So if you’re thinking about how to improve your field sales performance, start with these ideas that I’ve given you. They make a lot of sense and experience has shown that they can greatly boost the productivity, motivation, and the sales results of your team.

Direct Marketing is the direct mailing to potential customers to tell them about your products and services and deliver a simple message compelling them to come by something from you or sign-up for service. Direct sales are very similar in that you send people rather then mailed items directly to the potential customers to tell them about your products and services and explain how they can help your customer and why they should buy them from you.

Which works better? Well, you might find it quite surprising that they work really good in combination. For instance, rather than having your sales force cold call all the prospects on giant lists of potential customers; you can send them direct mail pieces and use this direct marketing technique to generate interest and then follow this top with a direct sales team.

This is one technique we had using our company called Bonsai and Blitz Marketing. The bonsai part of the mission was to gather data, addresses of potential customers and the best zones, zip codes and areas where we expected our target market to be.

Once we sent out the mail packages, we then followed up with phone calls or stopped in. It was incredible the response we got by putting these together.

Many small businesses do no marketing at all and that is unfortunate because they should at least do the minimum for instance hiring a company that does direct marketing by mail and sends out those packages of coupons and advertisements to potential customers in areas you know to have your highest level of clientele. How much does it cost?

You might be surprised that direct marketing by mail costs very little considering the number of customers who will come in. That is if you have designed your ad correctly and give them compelling reason to come in and buy from you.

Certain types of companies like video store rentals, dog grooming, haircut places and car washes do extremely well in these types of direct mail advertising pieces. But you would be surprised that professionals such as lawyers, doctors and dentists also do quite well in direct marketing mailings.

Before you choose to save your money and do no marketing at all, you should do the bare minimum and that is a one line listing in the Yellow Pages and a little bit of direct mail marketing to promote your business. If you do not tell customers what you have the offer then you cannot expect them to stop in and buy something from you.

If you have watched the reality TV show by Donald Trump, The Apprentice, you will agree with me that Trump is one of the best businessmen in the world today. From the way he arrives at decisions as to who goes up the suite and who takes the elevator, to his vast business interests, Trump comes across as the archetypical shrewd businessman of our time.

From his decisiveness and brutal execution of decisions, to his obstinate obsession with profit, Trump is a paragon of today’s astute businessman. To him, the best entrepreneur is one who gets the highest buck out of a deal. Period! If there’s a name to describe a shrewd businessman, that name can be encapsulated in the person of Donald Trump.

In his flagship TV program, The Apprentice, Trump cuts the figure of one whose overriding preoccupation is making profit. Granted, this is what every business aspires to do – to make profit. However, it’s my personal opinion that he sometimes overreaches himself when making some of his famed decisions. As far as he is concerned, the team that brings in ‘the most money’ at the end of the day is the team that wins. If your team is unfortunate to tag along the rear end, then, as good old Donald would say, ‘someone will get fired’. If this person ends up being you, the words ‘you are fired’ – as only Trump can say them – will ring very true indeed.

Although I agree with most of Donald Trump’s ‘I’m-sorry-you-are-fired’ decisions, there are instances when I felt his obsession with profits may have obscured his judgment as to who gets fired and who stays. This is where I beg to part ways with him.

Relationships and not just profits are a vital ingredient in every venture. Every manager or leader of a group should endeavor to build positive relationships among his or her team if they are to get optimal performance from them. People need to feel that you care about them enough to give them another chance when things occasionally go awry.

The fact that a certain employee bungles things one day does not mean he or she is ineffective as an employee. One could just be having a bad day. We all have had days when our motivation to perform was seriously hampered by events or things that happened to us, e.g. a parent who left a sick child at home may seem absent-minded and not as ‘sharp’ as everyone else. A spouse who left home for work after having an ugly quarrel with a partner may easily get irritated at the office and therefore not be in sync with the rest of the team.

Women have 3 assets that I see as secret weapons in the business world. For the past 30 years or so, women have been encouraged to behave as their male counterparts do so they can succeed and achieve equality. To me, this is backward and counterproductive because they have several valuable skills that businesses need to grow and serve their customers well. Since people are unique, these assets show up differently in each woman. Today I'll share the 3 most important of these abilities with you. My hope is that these skills will be recognized for the powerhouses of strength that they truly are.

Women have strong verbal communication skills. In fact, scientists and psychologists tell us that women speak more than 3 times as many words during a day than men do. Furthermore, our conversations tend to involve responsive listening and focus on the process of relations rather than sharing facts. Women know how to build rapport, understand a person's strengths and weaknesses, and can easily include encouragement in conversation. Businesses need effective communication and team building skills, especially in sales, marketing, and negotiations.

Second, women are intuitively skilled negotiators. They have been conditioned for centuries to get what they want through negotiation and community. No matter how you feel about it, this is an historical fact and is our present reality. Women had little economic power, and they learned how to work in a system where they weren't the boss. Rather than direct bloody fighting and wars, they learned to work with others and create good compromises or find a win/win outcome. Now that they have economic freedom, they can use the skills they've learned to help themselves reach their goals and do it with class. these skills can help an organization flourish by creating partnerships with those they do business with. Win/win situations are good for everybody, and women have a talent for finding ways to make that happen. They've done this socially for centuries, and their mothers have taught them these skills from infancy. Women just don't recognize it and thus think they can't negotiate in business matters. They can, and they can often see win/win options that their male colleagues miss.

The final secret weapon women have is their ability to work as part of a team. Again, this is partially due to their inborn character as a female and partially due to their cultural conditioning. Have you ever noticed that when you're with a group at a restaurant, one woman at the table says she's going to use the ladies room; almost immediately others will go with her? They often will go as a group and will come back to the table together. You don't see this behavior from men. Our culture seems to value the image of a self-made tycoon who takes the business world by storm. Reality is very different though. Most "self-made" business tycoons have a quality team of support staff behind them. It is actually the power of the team that brings success. Those companies who reward employees for good teamwork will profit and will survive when hard times come. Women excel at teamwork, and they should be sought out for this quality. Mary Kay Ash understood this well, and she became wealthy by creating a team and helping each team member to reach his/her personal goals.

Women who recognize the power of these 3 secret weapons can accomplish anything they want to do. Using her strong communication skills, her ability to negotiate well, and her teamwork skills, the sky is the limit. Will she be a self-made tycoon? Probably not, and to me, that's as it should be. Can she build wealth and reach her dreams? Yes! You would win that bet!

Most car washes these days have robotic tunnel operated systems. These systems have an array of sensors, which tell the machine where the car is as it goes through. There are more robotics in the average carwash than the winner of the Grand DARPA Challenge, which drove an unmanned ground vehicle through the desert.

Why are there so many robotic systems in the modern-day carwash? Well, it is simple a good tunnel carwash can clean a car every 45 seconds or less and two humans working at breakneck speed would take at least two to three minutes.

Now let's flash forward to the present day and the unemployment of 4.7% in the United States of America. Car washes are now having trouble getting cashiers to work behind the counter of the carwash. This means they are looking for ways to go robotic in that job category as well.

Consider if you will the modern-day grocery store or Wal-Mart and how they have robotic cashiers now that are fully automated. Although they do not work perfect, they come in handy if you only have a couple of items and the lines are long. Perhaps it is more of an issue of the perception of service at the carwash that is holding us back.

The fact is however with the labor so tight and more and more people wanting their car washes quicker and for a lower price the modern-day carwash owner has really no choice but to go with a robotic cashier.

There are more and more high-tech sensors entering the realms of robotic car wash tunnel systems. There are many reasons for this, but most has to do with supply and demand issues and the shortage of labor in the United States. Currently with unemployment hovering at between 4.7 and 4.8% and illegal immigration under fire most car wash companies know they must adapt or die to these forward trends.

Thus more car wash robotics are coming into play and with robotic systems come robotic sensors. Currently sonar sensors are used in car washes for many things including soap, waste water, fresh water tank volume reading. Ultra-sonic sensors are also used in a similar way to radar.

Ultra-sonic sensors use sound instead of light and this is good in a misty and soapy environment as light gets refracted easily. Unfortunately, air blowers move the air and disrupt the sound waves in the process. But if the car is already done being washed then it need not matter.

Photoelectric sensors are much preferred but cost is a consideration and if one goes out then the tunnel wash is often rendered useless. Operators know to send a Ghost Car thru in the early morning just in case of catastrophe. Usually a very cheap employee’s car in case the system goes haywire?

One problem with photoelectric optical sensors is that they send a beam of infrared light, but that beam can be blocked by parts of the car and render it unusable. Photoelectric sensors can also be troublesome in harsh work environments with hydrofluoric acid, soaps, hot waxes, high pressure and steam. All of, which you find inside a tunnel modern day car wash.

Optical flow sensors are perhaps a future option for carwashes in that they can work backwards of normal optical flow sensors by mounting them on the tunnel wash frame from above and sending the information to the electronic arms of the robotic car wash equipment below.