infoBoard in Indianapolis
I flew with Delta Airlines from Boston to Indianapolis, the only direct flight between the two cities. I read a little bit about the city and …..it was all planned on a drawing board, it’s a copy of Washington.
My clients and one of their business partner from New Jersey were very close to the airport, within three miles distance. The biggest percentage of infoBoard’s american clients in the New World!
In relatively new and spacious airports there is a small but particular U-Boat. People are proud that Indiana is the U-boat’s location with USA’s longest tradition. I’m confused, although, because on the map I have never seen a big lake in Indiana except for a connection with the sea.
I turned down the idea of renting a car because everything is nearby. I thought I would have been be able to move well around the short roads with a taxi and a shuttle. I later understood that it didn’t work like that.
I waited for the shuttle to the hotel. I always call Uber and other private drivers per mobile phone. I waited for other hotel shuttle buses but after a while I decided to call the hotel once more. I knew that in the USA you have to dial +1 at the beginning and so I did but I still heard “The number you are calling…..”. Almost an hour later I called another hotel shuttle bus but this time without dialing the area code and I was able to book the hotel bus which was also supposed to arrive in 15 minutes. My phone, I don’t know how, connected to a telephone company and I could get in the american phone network.
While sitting on the bus I looked out at the road to see if I could have walked on the streets but the footpath ended with a small cars bridge, no chance.
After a short stop at the hotel, the hotel shuttle bus brought me wherever I wanted. Commercial enterprises were located, like it is common in America, in offices in big, plain buildings. And it’s not unusual to not have any signboards with the company’s name outside of these buildings. I only knew that the company had a sign close to Rolls Royce and was infront of Rolls Royce. But then I saw my american co-worker waving at me from a distance.
The conversation gets a pleasant twist when the owner of the company comes into the room and in that moment his young IT employee starts talking about how good german economy works and how beautiful the german landscape is. I can only agree with him. He continued to fancy me with the german restaurants’ road in the city center which is although very far away and later comes to his mind that most likely I know well enough german restaurants. The boss gives me a lift back to my hotel, it takes only three minutes and are there taxis here?
The next morning I all a taxi to go to a company’s training course. This works but I have to bolster the young taxi driver because he has never heared of the street. (but it is a very long street with an odd name: Girls School Street).
Very friendly welcome in the company: a programmer gave me an office where I could stretch and prepare. A walk through the halls of production made it clear why the production needs to be visualized: long rows of machinery are galvanized by metal ribbons with different high quality metals. Manufacturing orders can sometimes take up to one day to be processed, but there, where the copper coils can be split in different sizes to produce different orders at the same time, short processing and set-up times accrue and visualization is necessary to make better decisions on the order of the production.
Coffee, notebook and conference room, the company owner and 8 participants with different tasks ask questions and discuss about what the interface should achieve and on how the planners want to use infoBoard.They were also interested to see the IP camera function of the infoBoard rows.
The programmer ist happy that the interface requirements are becoming easier and easier and at the end everybody said a sincere thank you for the instructive day. She also showed me her own production development calender in MS Access, which simply didn’t have acceptable reaction times.
I was kindly brought to the airport by my contact person because when I called for a taxi they told me they weren’t sure a taxi could get to me within 20 minutes.
I went back to Boston with Delta Airlines. I liked very much Boston’s city center and the Habor Walk Way where you can get anywhere by foot, like in Germany.