waste

Petition

  • Monday, 8 March, 2010
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I’ve written in the past about the government’s abysmal track record on IT development.  I met with the local MP to discuss the issues but he didn’t really get it; he sent me away to write a policy paper for him which I really had time for…  So good news that someone is doing something about it with a petition on the Number 10 website.

In his recent update on the progress of the petition, Rob Bowley mentions the Rural Payments Agency project.  I can’t attest to either have been an ‘expert’ or to have had a salary anything near what he mentions, but I was a consultant on that project so nod in informed agreement.  That experience gave me a benchmark to compare ‘bad’ ways of going about an IT project to compare with the ‘good’ world of lean and agile that I now inhabit.

Please sign the petition.

Why it pays to think about the whole system, not just your local function

  • Monday, 30 November, 2009
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Ability to do bulk price mark-downs? Nice to have.

Today we are looking at a large UK supermarket stock control system.  At the end of the day the staff mark down prices on the short-life items (sandwiches etc).  They have a hand held scanner with a belt printer.  Scan item – print label – stick label on item.  Well that’s what the process is supposed to be, only this takes time (20 seconds per item) and when you have a whole shelf to do is a chore (12 items takes four minutes).  Far easier to just write down the new price on a ‘discount label’ with a sharpie and stick it over the barcode (do the whole shelf in less than a minute).

Where’s the problem in that?  In fact three minutes of waste (waiting time) has been eliminated.  Only it is a problem…

The customer takes the item to checkout and the mark-down label is covering the barcode.  The checkout colleague tries to peel it off to scan, but it doesn’t peel cleanly.  So she manually enters in the SKU. And the mark-down price.  And this has taken 2 minutes for one item and the queue has grown and because of the ‘one in front’ policy they have to open a new checkout and suddenly that small problem at one end of the value chain is replaced by a bigger costlier one at the front end.

But had we not observed this we would never know that bulk price mark-downs on the hand-held device is not a nice to have, it is million dollar requirement.