Industry 4.0, Sustainability and the Circular Economy

Figure 1: Industry 4.0

Credit : Christoph Roser [ CC BY-SA 4.0, Industry 4.0]

This post is as much about tuning readers into a recent discussion about information technology and sustainability as it is about demystifying terms and concepts in which this discussion is embedded.  The subject of this enthusiastic discussion is the anticipation of the next industrial revolution which is popularly dubbed as Industry 4.0.  Figure 1 presents a schematic snapshot of what this means and this Forbes article by Bernard Marr provides a synoptic summary of the concept. Closely linked to this discussion is the concept of what is being called a Circular Economy.  This short article and video by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation beautifully summarizes the concept of circular economy.    

If you are wondering why is all the above relevant to this Blog then I must quickly mention that it is not everyday that Information Technology and Sustainability cross paths in the way that is happening with Industry 4.0. In fact the buzz is so high that just a few days ago (23rd August 2019),  The Hindu published an interview with Mr. Li Yong, Director-General of the  United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) on how Industry 4.0 will make the planet more sustainable.  

Mikkel Stein Knudsen and Jari Kaivo-oja from the Finland Futures Research Institute, University of Tukru, present a more expansive and rounded discussion on this subject for those who want to explore this interface in more detail.

While talk has already started about Industry 5.0 , some people are not so enamoured by industry buzzwords and seeing this progression as unsustainable, interpret Industry 5.0 differently (Figure 2 - Click to enlarge). They too might have a point — after all industrialization and sustainability have not exactly been simpatico thus far ! 

Figure 2: Industry 5.0

Credit: Letmeseenow and ChristophRoser, based on File:Industry 4.0.png [CC BY-SA 4.0 ]

What do you think ?

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A Chart is Worth a Thousand Cells !

Excel has options to create some great non-conventional charts. For this post, I have tried to compile some real life examples for some of these charts. So here goes !

Bubble Chart

I came across this interesting bubble chart that maps movie release date (X), movie budget (Y) and Worldwide gross earnings (Z - the size of the bubble)

http://bit.do/e5sqS

While the site does not provide the data that was used to create this chart, the following website does have all the data that you need to recreate this kind of chart in excel. You need to copy name of the movie, release date, production budget and worldwide release data columns into excel and give it a shot !

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all

While on the subject of bubble charts, why not visit gapminder.org - a free interactive data visualization tool based on reliable public data. They have an interesting bubble chart that displays life expectancy, GDP income and population revealing a startling fact that people from rich countries live longer. Play around with other data options like changing population to income for bubble sizes. It's interactive and fun !

http://bit.do/e5ssA

There is another bubble chart created by UNEP that shows wealth and per capita CO2 emissions. 

Treemap Chart

This example of a tree map chart comes from the World Bank which analyses country wise trade data (import /export). When  you visit this site do  try "other visualizations" and press the download button to get the data. Try creating this chart yourself in excel using the downloaded data.

http://wits.worldbank.org/visualization/country-analysis-visualization.html 

Radar Chart or Spider Chart ( looks like a spiders web doesn't it !)

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) presents this great radar chart which helps compare a countries performance on five indicators and compare it with global average. Interestingly, the source of this chart is called a traffic light table (remember constitutional formatting!) . Have a look ( scroll down halfway)

https://www.oecd.org/dev/migration-development/knomad-dashboard.htm

Another interesting radar chart as part of a research paper comparing three technologies. Read just above and below the graph for an interpretation of the chart

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25718-1_12#Fig3 

Sunburst Chart ( Nested Pie Chart)

Sunburst chart shows hierarchical data. An interesting example is as follows.

Example  : Energy Consumption and Energy Sources for some countries

If you wish to try out this chart in excel, you will have to type out this data ( Yes !) as shown in the picture on the right ( click on the pic to enlarge).

Waterfall Chart

Waterfall charts are great to show postive and negative cumulative totals like cash flows etc.

Example - Cash Flows Analysis

Example - Cash Flows With Totals 


I hope this post helps in providing some additional insights into some unconventional charts and creating better data visualizations.

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A Second Dose of MS Excel

In this post I would like to share a few more videos that I have created to illustrate some other interesting Excel concepts.  The focus of the tutorials featured in this post is to connect the dots by tying basic concepts and using them in real life scenarios.So here is the second dose of MS Excel:

 Video Tutorial 6: Using VLOOKUP to create Business Reports

Real life scenario and use case: You have lots of data in your spreadsheets and you want to create summary reports pulling out relevant data items from these sheets. Using the VLOOKUP function and concepts in Video 8, you can create many useful business reports. This shows an interesting practical use of the VLOOKUP function and why it is so sought after by 'Excellers' .

Video Tutorial 7:  Data Consolidation in MS Excel

Real life scenario and use case : You have many offices or branches and each office sends you data in different Excel workbooks by email. Using the consolidation tool in Excel, you can summarize data in these different sheets & workbooks on one sheet. A great skill to learn that can save you hours of work!

Video Tutorial 8: Tables and Data Validation Using Dynamic Lists

Real life scenario and use case: You want to provide users with drop down lists to select data making sure that as data is added to your sheet, the drop down continues including the newly entered data and this list keep dynamically evolving.  We will use the concepts in this video to great effect in the next tutorial to create interesting business reports. 

Video Tutorial 9: Entering, Modifying and Deleting Data Using Forms

Real life scenario and use case : You have a huge sheet and you want to enter, modify or delete data cleanly without scrolling up, down, left or right in those humongous spreadsheets. This easy trick shows you how.

Hope you enjoyed these video lessons. There is a lot more to know and I am sure these short tutorials will motivate you to keep learning !

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Enhancing MS Excel Skills

MS Excel is undoubtedly a business managers best friend. Becoming better at Excel is therefore a truly worthy goal for budding managers. Through this post, I wish to share a few short video tutorials that I have created to help students to explore a little more of Excel. These are just pointers and you can explore these topics in more details for other use cases. So here goes my tutorial list:

Video Tutorial 1: How to Protect your Excel Sheet

Video Tutorial 2: Some Time Saving Excel Tips

Video Tutorial 3: VLOOKUP Function - Part 1 (Exact Matches)

Video Tutorial 4: VLOOKUP Function - Part 2 ( Approximate Matches)

Video Tutorial 5: Microsoft Excel : Pivot Tables

Video Tutorial 6: Using Array Formulas

For those of you who wish to  improve your Excel skills further, edX has a few free MS Excel courses on business and data analytics. Enroll and start learning !

MS Excel has a huge and committed global fan following. Professor Clint Tuttle, of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin  has even created this totally awesome MS Excel Song to musically motivate his students to learn and become better at Excel.What commitment from this really cool dude ! 

And still some say professors are boring !   Liars !

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PowerPoint : Loved and Hated in Equal Measure

Given the ephemeral nature of the fast paced digital world that we live in,  it is not everyday that you come across a software that has lasted 32 years and is still going strong.  Robert Gaskins, who is widely credited as one of the inventors of the PowerPoint idea [1], recounts the history of this software in a BBC Interview. Many might find it ironical that PowerPoint initially debuted in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh computers. Forethought Inc, the startup that had created PowerPoint, was in the same year, acquired by Microsoft but PowerPoint somehow entered the Microsoft windows stable only after three years of that acquisition. The rest, as they say is history. Nerds can visit Robert Gaskin’s home page for a rich collection of facts, photos and videos detailing the history and development of this legendary software.

PowerPoint has since become the ‘ruling deity’ of the presentation universe churning out the good, the bad and the ugly slide decks by the thousands every single day. And with all that action underway, making good presentations has become an essential survival skill. A frequently asked question in this backdrop is – what does it take to create a killer presentation? The short answer is – a powerful idea! And if you have that idea, PowerPoint with its rich collection of tools, can help you weave it into a compelling storyboard. Readers are invited to view 25 awesome presentations (which includes one by Seth Godin on making good presentations!) to see for themselves how PowerPoint has acted as a via media to tell really compelling stories. One common design principle that you can’t miss in each of these presentations is the minimal use of text and the maximum use of visuals. Writers like Nancy Duarte even use PowerPoint to write books !

PowerPoint, with all its wholesome goodness however, has attracted its fair share of detractors too! The problems related to what some would call the detrimental effects of using (or overusing!) PowerPoint are nicely summarized in a January 2018 article on BBC ( has a link to an interesting Podcast too!). This criticism of PowerPoint is not a one off observation but rather has a long history. One of the prominent voices highlighting concern over the use (or overuse) of PowerPoint for many years has been former Yale Professor Edward Tufte. In two very widely read essays – PowerPoint Is Evil and the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint – Tufte argues his case against PowerPoint famously remarking – “Power Corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”. A New York Times article titled We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint by Elisabeth Bumiller narrates how the PowerPoint culture has slowly entrenched the US Armed forces and how top military commanders have shown their deep concern over this phenomenon. An article by Alan Lu follows a similar trajectory and raises some serious concerns about the unbridled use of PowerPoint from college lecture halls to corporate boardrooms. It might surprise many that the blame for the loss of space shuttle Columbia in which Kalpana Chawla and other astronauts tragically lost their lives has also been attributed to a PowerPoint Slide !   Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, has in fact gone so far as to completely ban PowerPoint at all meetings inside Amazon !  PowerPoints from morning to evening, day after day , kinda dumb you ( 2 million views!), don't they? 

Not everyone agrees though. David Silverman, in his Harvard Business Review article has attempted to put things in a different perspective arguing that the root cause of the ‘PowerPoint problem’ lies in the fact that more often than not, PowerPoint is used in situations for which it is not suited and in ways that are not consistent with this style of communication.

Arguments and counter arguments notwithstanding, PowerPoint is alive & well and is here to stay. Many feel that it is a great piece of software if you know how to use it effectively. I would like to invite the reader to spend time viewing these great tips and resources to create effective PowerPoint presentations.

The bottom-line is that PowerPoint should not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to an end which is to communicate your point across convincingly to your audience. Whenever you forget this simple truth and get lost in the glitz of bouncing shapes and swiveling transitions, you usually end up wishing that you could exit with the ‘fade’ effect.


 Edward Tufte sums this up rather nicely:

“If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant”.

I conclude this post with a poignant comment by David Grupper and David Klein of Point Made Animation Inc:

“Technology can dictate content in PowerPoint. Its default slide will inevitably lead to bad design in the hands of the inexperienced. How can ‘headline, bullet, bullet, bullet' lead anywhere else? But, as my father used to say – a bad workman blames his tools. PowerPoint is no more responsible for a boring presentation than Microsoft Word is to blame for a poorly written novel”.

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[1] Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin were the other two people who were involved in creating PowerPoint

[2] Image Credit: www.presentationzen.com