Day 48

Wednesday, March 26, 2008


Today we presented our research on our Controls topic for Accounting. This was a joint project encompassing both our Accounting and Communications classes. My group, made up of Darren (Smart & Final), Miguel (Costco), Christel (Safeway), Stephanie (Associated Foods), and Bill (Bristol Farms), chose Voice Recognition in Warehousing as our topic. In order to thouroughly research it we read tens of articles from journals and trade publications, contacted people in the industry that had brought such a system into their warehouses and toured a 700,000 square foot grocery warehouse in Commerce, CA to see it in action.


One of the really exciting things about the program is the contacts you make and the ease with which information becomes available. Throughout our research for various presentations we've been able to call upon executives at several companies and they've been very helpful in getting us any informatiton we need.

Our goal for the presentation was to make a persuasive pitch for implementing the control in a real life situation. While we certainly wouldn't win any academy awards for best story, we tried to make it as interesting as possible by showing a very short live demonstration of how the system works and some video of it in action at a warehouse. We're still learning the ropes of presenting, but we've already improved quite a bit. On the other hand, our ability to critically evaluate presentations has also improved quite a bit and we felt that we didn't do as well as we could have. That said, the class rated our presentation as the best overall. In their evaluations they also gave us some things to work on in order to get even better in the future, as did professors Miles and Davila.