I awoke early on this Saturday morning (no alarm clock) after a not
particularly restful night. One reason is that my lower legs are aching again,
but the other reason is that I spent quite some time thinking about and dreaming
about Eli.
Yesterday I neglected to mention that one thing that surprised me about Eli
was his patience when dealing with people who clearly did not understand
topics that seem simple and obvious to him (and to me), such as inventory
maintenance and cost accounting. Whilst I would not expect 'the man in the
street' to understand these topics, someone who is performing a professional
job in these areas should understand. I remember speaking to his secretary
after one such incident, saying that I would never have been so patient with
the non-understanding person; "yes", she said, "he's very patient". Maybe I'm
growing more patient myself as I spent several hours a few days ago trying to explain to a
purchasing manager why a (general) part that is marked 'without inventory
management' does not enter inventory.
This morning I remembered a turning point in our relationship, from way back
in 2005. I didn't remember the date so I had to look through a series of
emails to my friend, when I used to write about many subjects, including work
and Eli. His arrival is noted, the way that we started off on a bad manner,
how things improved - or did not - over the years. I wanted to write yesterday
that Eli never lost his temper, despite the various provocations, but it turns
out that this was not true. Maybe he mellowed over the years, but certainly
the four years in which he managed the chairs factory were very difficult
(both in terms of company performance and in terms of personal relationships)
and I was surprised to read that several times I thought about leaving the
company.
I want to quote (almost verbatim) a portion of an email that I wrote in April
2005; reading it now, I don't know how much my correspondent understood, but
it serves as an excellent reminder. I had a eureka moment a few days ago. A couple of months ago, someone in
the sales department voiced the wish to produce price quotations along with
pictures of the chairs. At first I wasn't too keen about programming this,
as it would have taken a great deal of work, at least in the original
vision. Someone else approached various companies for quotations, and we had
a summing up meeting in which we heard that such a program (in its grand
vision) would cost at least $5000. By this stage I had done some thinking
and realised that our usual [quasi ERP] program could output data to Excel,
and with the help of a macro within Excel, we could marry the pictures to
the data. Cost: nil. Time necessary for development: a few hours. So I
started work on this, and finished about a month ago.
All the time I had been saying that we needed a library of pictures whose
names would match the part numbers, whether we use my simple solution or
some outside program. But the person who dreamt up the idea hadn't bothered
to do anything about this, and received a sharp rebuke from the general
manager that the program's deployment was now dependent on the library being
created. Two weeks later we had a library (missing quite a few pictures) and
a date was set for training. So for last Tuesday I prepared a four page
document explaining in excrutiating detail how to prepare a price quotation
with pictures, and in the afternoon I displayed it to about 10 people.
Despite this being a quick and simple solution, I had some nagging feelings
about it, completely different feelings from anyone else.
After the meeting, someone else came up to me with a problem about labels -
we print two labels for every chair which get stuck on the chair's bottom
and its plastic bag, so that we can identify them. The problem had a simple
solution and he went away satisfied. That evening I went walking, and is my
wont I cast my mind over the day's events. The slight unease which I had
felt regarding the training was suddenly replaced with great excitement when
I recalled the label incident. For, what is the label if not a printout from
our ERP program along with a picture?
The next morning I wrote a detailed email explaining the 'aha' moment, and
as there wasn't too much work on hand, I started work on the program. By
Thursday evening it was in a reasonable state of completion; bits and pieces
got added on Friday morning, and then on Sunday I added the piece de
resistance - sending the program's output not to a printer but rather to a
quasi-printer which creates PDF files. These are document files which are
platform-independent, ie they can be read on many computer systems: Windows,
Macintosh, Linux et al. This way, the user runs the program which extracts
data from our database program, matches pictures, creates a pdf file and
then sends it to the customer via email. An added benefit is that we don't
have to print the quotation but rather let the customer do it himself (less
costs for us).
The point of all the above is the 'sharp rebuke' that someone received. This
someone was a 'golden' boy who had been forced upon us (kibbutz workers) and had
done nothing to justify his rating, so that was also a good moment.
One thing that Eli had been doing over the past few years, with my active
encouragement, was codifying knowledge. This means that instead of having
specific work-related knowledge existing only in a worker's brain, it would be
somehow stored in our ERP program so that we would be less dependent on that
worker and more independent. As I wrote in my doctoral thesis (still awaiting
a date for the viva examination), An additional goal was to reduce the number of production decisions taken
on the factory floor, by institutionalising the knowledge via improved BOMs
and accurate data about inventory and scheduling. This knowledge would now
be stored in the ERP system, immune to personnel changes and knowledge
hoarding. This goal is aligned with the knowledge retention practices as
outlined by Jayawickrama et al. (2019) and preventing knowledge erosion
(Wickert and Herschel, 2001). In my world, this is very important, but I couldn't have achieved it without Eli's support.
Rereading this blog gives the impression that it's more about the professional me than it is about remembering Eli. So be it.
No doubt I will have more remarks to make, later on.
This day in history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 616 | Puzzle | Puzzles | |
| 750 | Robin Williams, RIP | Films, Obituary |
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