The last installment of the on-going DBA saga was at the end of April when I finished rewriting all the theoretical material in the thesis. Since then, I have barely touched the thesis because of all the personal issues that I have had since May.
About ten days ago I went a long walk with the dog and wondered how I could get the thesis back on track; I decided to start with a description of my company and the initiatives that we have undertaken in the past year or so. As I wrote that a good ERP system reacts to changes in the company, it is only natural to discuss the various enhancements that I had to develop in order to express these initiatives. This is good material, but I had what I term a 'crisis of faith' as none of the enhancements seem to fall into what I could call 'classic enhancements' as per the thesis definition; they all seem to be one sided (receiving a file produced by an external program and creating a set of parts and a BOM from the file; developing 'batch' processing; creating a purchasing recommendation program based on data from the 'automatic warehouse'). It may be that I will consider the automatic creation of parts and BOM followed by the purchasing recommendation as part of the same enhancement, as the recommendations are based on the quantities expressed in the BOMs that came from the external program.
In the mean time, I have reverted to considering the pilot study. For this, I am using a 'classic' enhancement that failed: task and time management. This is something that started in July 2020 and collapsed towards the end of last year. I 'interviewed' myself in order to get as many facts about the enhancement as well as some analysis as to why the enhancement failed. I then started looking for documents and found several: some are specifications, becoming more detailed as time went on, and some are documents explaining how to use the enhancement. I also found several emails about the process.
After completing the self-interview, I started writing the invitation letter to colleagues who were involved in the development and deployment of the enhancement. This might sound very simple but it took several hours to get right; finding a logical order to talking about the research methodology then then the enhancement itself and what I am expecting of people was not easy, and I'm not sure that it's totally clear. After I finished writing the letter yesterday evening, I translated it into Hebrew and this morning sent it to about eight people who were all involved at some stage or another, some more than others.
The pilot study is intended to familiarise myself with the Action Research methodology and is not intended to produce any conclusions. That said, I surprised myself slightly when writing conclusions at the end of my 'interview': this enhancement had nothing to do with increasing the throughput/shortening through times of the furniture division which is probably why it failed; it was perceived as pure overhead that hindered more than helped. I think that enhancements that improve/shorten are more likely to succeed than those that do other things, probably because the direct value can be perceived whereas indirect value is harder to see. It will be interesting to read/hear what my colleagues have to say for themselves; I don't want to put ideas into their heads.
I have a chat with my supervisor tomorrow morning when I can update him with my work of the past ten days.
In the mean time, I have recently been approached (via LinkedIn) by two people (one in Australia and one in Japan) asking about the DBA programme. In neither case has a dialogue emerged yet, but this could be interesting. At the moment, I'm wondering how they heard about me.
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