Another case study for the DBA - that can validate my model

About ten days ago, I received a letter at work, than when translated into colloquial English, said something along the lines of The CEO mentioned in a meeting, in a way that some might have taken to be an off-the-cuff remark that he envisages a factory, or at least a department with the existing factory, "Legs Inc", that manufactures four parts only (plain metal legs). These would be used by OffFurnCo for colour plating or even sold to outside manufacturers.

My immediate reaction was One might imagine that this is not difficult to do, but unfortunately manufacture for inventory is not the standard method of operation for OffFurnCo! There are two major challenges created by the current standard method of operation: (1) creation and management of work orders that are not connected to customer orders; (2) the configurator is liable to create duplicate parts to the plain metal legs – these will have to be managed somehow.

We had a meeting on the topic last Wednesday; in the middle of the meeting, I realised that this would be an excellent opportunity for my doctoral research. This is a new enhancement that can be managed on the basis of the model that my research proposes, and in fact will serve as a validation study, something that has been lacking.

As beholds an enhancement managed according to the model, I wrote a specification on Thursday, as full as I could make it for the time, and noting where there were areas that I was not sure what should be (primarily the two challenges that I note in the second paragraph above). On Sunday, I was sent the number of a part that would be suitable for manufacture by this new system; on the basis of my specification, I built a new son part for the part that I was sent, and defined it accordingly. I wrote a simple work order generator for this new system and fully debugged it.

I also wrote a note to my doctoral supervisor telling him about developments, and whether the thesis should be submitted now (I am supposed to submit by the end of the year) with a note to say that another test case in under way, or request an extension that would allow the enhancement to be completed and for me to research it.

We had another meeting on Monday, where the engineering department, working in parallel to me, had defined their own test part. Unfortunately for them, this part is not one that is intended to be manufactured by the new system, but we did learn from this example that there were definitions that need to be added to the part that I had defined. During the next few days, they will add the engineering definitions to my simple test part and then we can make a test run that will examine how the configurator works in this new situation.

In the mean-time, I received no word from my supervisor, and whilst showering yesterday evening, I considered my options. Fortunately this morning I received a note from him (I would like to say that my thinking about him in the shower caused him to write, but I can see from the time stamp that he wrote to me yesterday morning. As he writes, We shouldn't be submitting the thesis when suggesting the research is still not complete. If this enhancement is relevant and important to the research then I would suggest you wait until it concludes and then include it into the Thesis. To be honest you cannot really say there is additional research data pending... it's either in or it's out.

So with that clarified, I am going to be working on the enhancement at work, whilst at home I will be revising whatever needs to be rewritten in the thesis, and adding what needs to be added. I expect that everything will be over by the end of January.