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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But what about training and processes?

The tech part is easy, relatively speaking.

The hard part is each plant can have hundreds of workers whose entire jobs depend on the way things are set up. It can be hugely expensive, time-consuming and disrupting for months to try to replace processes with new ones, particularly if you expect things to continue running without interruption. It's one of those rebuild-the-airplane-while-flying-it situations.

Maybe this was a uniquely lucky situation, because it doesn't sound like a generalizable magic-bullet to me.

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It would definitely be interesting to hear the other side of this anecdote. My guess is that there's a lot of workarounds happening at the plant level that are being hidden.

The plant now tracks each individual product, line, customer, contract in realtime with complete transparency to the parent company. They swipe barcodes and use online tools. Their processes were streamlined and paper removed.

It wasn't painless for everybody. In each region some good ol boy would resign the week before changeover. When they'd come in to do inventory some room or shed would be locked and nobody would have the key. They'd break the lock and whattaya know, the room would be empty. Supposed to be full of inventory.

>The plant now tracks each individual product, line, customer, contract in realtime with complete transparency to the parent company.

I'm sure that's what the parent company thinks is happening. Whether that's what actually is happening at the plant level is another question. So is whether the improvement came with a hit to productivity or any other hidden cost. Obviously I know nothing specific about the company but speaking generally I've seen a lot of work arounds and inefficiencies in my day.

Yes, every single item on every single line is tracked. Nothing (can) get sold without being in the system.

Doubters abound. Even now a decade later, folks meet this story with disbelief and doubt.

>Yes, every single item on every single line is tracked. Nothing (can) get sold without being in the system.

Worker: "Steve from Acme Co. needs a doohickey with a widget today but we don't have a SKU for that"

Boss: "Corporate takes 2 days to issue SKUs so just mark it as a doohickey and charge him 10% more for the widget"

Or maybe the customer has to go somewhere else because their turn around time can't be met.

>Doubters abound. Even now a decade later, folks meet this story with disbelief and doubt.

Because it's not our first time at the rodeo. If massive IT projects were this easy we'd all be doing it like that. They're generally not. Steam rolling the end user may have worked this time but other times it's ground the business to a halt because those individual plant level differences were there for a reason.

They're massive because they're made to be that way. Technology transition takes will and backbone. If that's missing, there's where $25M gets spent down the drain.

I agree they generally don't go well. Because they're run by weak Directors and VPs who are 2nd-guessing IT and getting in the way.

Plant differences are all well and good. But so is "IT not collapsing under 20 years of cruft". It costs something to bring all the plants in line. But it also profits e.g. they're still in business after 10 years.

Here's how the money part went. Once the tracking went online, they realized (region by region) they were losing $1M per month. 2nd month: losing $0.5M. Third month: break even. 4th month: 1M in the green.

Why? Because they now knew (for the first time) what the hell they were selling, how much to whom, and for what price. The VPs quickly became totally addicting to this instant-knowledge web API and used it to turn the business around.

I was a consultant and ran IT security years ago at a company that was bought in a hostile takeover for ~$1B which was a significant premium in order to get some expertise for a special market they didn't have in house. One of the first things the purchaser did was tell the acquired company that they needed to change all their SKUs to match the corporate standard. At least some management at the purchaser knew that the acquired company used SKUs to track batches so they could detect, track and troubleshoot manufacturing and design defects, but apparently thought that standardization was more important. That was far from their only bad decision but within 5 years they'd run their 1B investment down to just the residual value of the IP about 100M. Fitting things into a procrustean bed (standardization) isn't always a good business strategy and inventory management in particular can be more complicated than it looks.

I used to work in retail at Circuit City. Our inventory was a mess, so corporate hired a company to fix that. At 4 AM a bus rolled up with people that spent all morning scanning items. We had to monitor them for theft and such (yes we saw several attempts).

They did an awful job. For example they scanned an item and then saw there were 10 items behind it and just multiplied the first item by 10 on the scanner (think of thumbdrives where the first one is a 512 MB drive and towards the back there may be a 256 MB drive). Afterwards, our inventory was worse than before. Corporate of course couldn't know this. I know your story is different, but they could still be getting duped.

I've seen this before with customer satisfaction. In data collection efforts driven by executives you can easily get bad results because they have zero visibility into the data collection process and its abuses and problems. I call it garbage in, gospel out.

They had all those problems, and solved them by being prepared. Training happened before changeover with a separate team moving from region to region.

Because something is difficult doesn't mean it is impossible, or shouldn't be done. The critical part is deciding you are going to do it, and not go back.

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