New friend

It seems that I have a new friend in my life: a hardbound book called 'Information Technology for Manufacturing' by Kevin Ake, John Clemons and Mark Cubine. If indeed it is available for $39.39 from American Amazon then go for it, because I paid nearly the same price in British pounds (from the Book Depository). I am going to call this book 'ITM' and create a tag for it so that in the future it will be easy to find references to this book in the blog.

I've only read the first three chapters of ITM but it seems to be an ideal source of information and ideas on how to improve the use of one's ERP system (the subtitle of the book is 'reducing costs and expanding possibilities').

I bought the book because I am seriously considering studying for a doctorate degree in business administration (DBA) when I finish my MBA degree, and it's good to start as soon as possible in finding ideas which need to be solved. As opposed to the MBA, in which students are taught the material, the DBA allows the student to display his prior knowledge whilst making a contribution of his own to the literature.

At the moment, it looks like my topic will be addressing the failures of 'standard' ERP and showing how these failures can be ameliorated by the use of 'extended' ERP. It occurs to me that I would not be able to do so had not Priority, the ERP system with which I work, not been extensible (it allows the user to define his own tables, data entry screens and reports).

My aim at the moment is two-fold: to identify such areas (I've already noted two) and to show how it is possible to handle them.

Why do I write that this book is my new friend? Because it looks like ITM will be accompanying me intimately for a long trip into the future. Because I woke up this morning at 4:30am with an idea which came from the intellectual stimulation caused by my new friend!

As is expounded in the first three chapters of ITM, 'standard' ERP was developed for the corporate staff; it handles accountancy, purchasing, sales, manpower, etc very well, but does not have the level of support necessary for the data collected at the plant level. That's not to say that there is no such support, but rather the existing support is designed and implemented from the corporate point of view (an interesting example of bias).

I woke up so early this morning with an idea which can be summed up in two words: time slices.  ERP offers no standard method of storing time slice data. Whilst writing those words, it occurs to me that in the chair factory, we know every day the status of each order: how many of the chairs in each order have been produced and by whom, by virtue of the fact that the manager of the production line sits down at the end of the day and enters this data into the standard program.

But chairs are discrete objects whose production time is measured in minutes. On the other hand, we have the woodwork factory whose production time is measured in days, where it's hard to assign specific tasks to specify people and where it seems that the methods of following production were designed by someone divorced from the way the factory works (or more correctly, divorced from the way the factory works now). As a result, the plant manager has to resort to maintaining an Excel spreadsheet which keeps all the data which are relevant to him.

The very word 'Excel' acts as a springboard: as I have written before, 'whenever I hear the word Excel, I reach for my gun'. Here, the word Excel means that there is a lacuna in ERP which cannot be solved by traditional methods but can be solved by 'extended' ERP (enter cartoon character ERPman stage left). What we need to do is to convert this spreadsheet into a 'time slice' data table which then can be analysed using all the strong methods and advantages of the SQL database.

The plant manager sent me a copy of his spreadsheet a few months ago but I returned it, saying that there was no way to maintain that kind of data in Priority. That's a true statement if one is working in the blinkered standard ERP but not true when one enters the brave new world of extended ERP. On Sunday morning I shall dig out that spreadsheet and start examining how I can transfer it: what data fields are needed, which will come automatically from the database and which will be entered manually, how to present a suitable input screen to the user, etc.

The ideas are running around my head - which is why I woke up at 4:30am. There's no point in going back to bed as it is now 5:30am which is when I would have woken up anyway.