My name is Frank Tagliarini. Originally from Tampa, my family and I
relocated to Gainesville for my job in 2003. I am the Environmental, Health and
Safety Manager for the Anheuser-Busch Packaging Group's Gainesville Lid Plant.
This is my final year at UF. I have been with A-B for 22 years, starting at
Busch Gardens in Tampa in 1986. My wife and I have been married for 16 years and
have two wonderful daughters aged 11 and 6.
After completing UF, I plan on staying a little while longer in Gainesville, probably no more than a year, before moving onto another part of Anheuser-Busch. My resume can be found here.
I work daily purchasing products from online companies, both large and small. An online presence is critical today. There have been items that I have purchased that could not have been located, much less purchased, had it not been for a businesses web site. In some cases, the company has been very small, but had a single page website that was easy to find and gave their contact information clearly. The ability to purchase from them online makes it all the better. I purchase from larger companies as well, but I base whether or not I'm going to do business with them on how easy their site is to navigate and if they have adequate security on their site. In addition to purchasing, clearly a web presence is essential if a company wants their product to be seen. A billboard or TV commercial just isn't enough with today's web savvy consumers.
I listen to podcasts daily. In fact, I no longer listen to broadcast radio. For businesses, I can see very little benefit in podcasting information about what they do. If most listeners are like me, and I think they are, they listen for entertainment purposes, maybe informational. The shows I listen to, “Nobody Likes Onions” and “Distorted View” are adult comedy shows. If a business were to use a show like these to advertise on, than that would make sense, but to have a listener have t9 go out and look for a podcast to find information about a product, I think, just wouldn’t work. As a means to provide instruction for a product, podcasting could be helpful, but as a means to get the word out about a product, not so much.
As a frequent user of email, both at work and at home, I am aware of the importance of sending and receiving secure messages. While working with confidential or sensitive information, it's important to know that what you are sending is not only getting to the right person, but that if it does get into the wrong hands, the information is still protected.
One example that I am aware of where encrypted email would have helped protect data is at work. An email was sent to an individual that had a smiliar name to that of the intended recepient. The sender sent sensitive information to the wrong person. Fortunately, it was a person in our company who recognized the sensitivity of the information and informed the sender. While one can assume that the original email was deleted from the incorrect recepients inbox, it is not a guarantee. Had the message been encrypted, however, this would not be a concern.
With a verified digital signature, recepients can be sure that messages they receive are from a reliable source. In these days of spam and frequent viruses, knowing who is sending what can help curb these annoyances and protect data.
With companies in just about every industry going global, and transportation costs rising, the use of internet, or intranet, based collaboration tools is essential. Allowing geographically separated employees to meet virtually and share ideas makes sense from an economic standpoint as well as from a team building standpoint. People tend to be more outgoing and talkative when communicating via text.
My company uses SharePoint in several different ways. Each morning, we have a Morning Meeting where we discuss the previous 24 hours production, safety incidents, quality and other key issues such as work order compliance alarm responses. We use SharePoint as a tool for tracking tasks and a calendar of the days’ events at this daily meeting.
With a 24 hour operation and over one hundred employees, SharePoint plays a major role in our facilities’ communication plan. With work stations scattered throughout the facility, employees can access their email or our companies’ intranet site at their leisure. The home page automatically goes to our SharePoint site which has the monthly calendar and announcements. Employees are also capable of posting announcements that are important to them, such as birth announcements or special projects in which they played a part.
One of the most important items on our SharePoint site is our Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) document library. Employees are able to download and print any SOP they may need. When a new SOP is entered into the system, an email is automatically generated and sent to the entire plant. SOP approvers use the site to view and approve new SOP’s as well.
As a collaborative tool, message boards, such as those available with SharePoint, are a valuable asset and time saver.
Click here to view Team 34's ad.
For this project I used Excel formulas to manipulate the provided data in several ways. The first was to parse some of the data, in this case
the state and zip code. I also used the Vlookup function to retrieve the region based on the state abbreviation.
While I am pretty familiar with the functions and capabilities of Excel, including the Left and Right functions as well as array functions,
I was not very familiar with pivot tables or the goal seek capabilities.
A copy of the pivot table can be viewed below:
