April 5, 2000
Dear Everyone:
Things are looking much brighter this week than
they did last week.
“Jeannie” reports that the talks with the lawyer in Oregon were fruitful
and, while there’s still work to be done, the ultimate outlook appears
positive.
On the office front, I can report some successes.
One of my greatest worries was about all the changes that had
taken place since we sent the data to the vendor.
In particular, thousands of boxes had been checked out to people.
And many of those boxes had been replaced on the shelves by other
boxes that were coming in.
But the new system won’t allow you to place a box on the shelf if the
system thinks the previous (checked out) box is still there.
So, Step One was to let the new system know about
all the boxes that had been checked out in the interim.
All this time, we’ve been downloading data from the barcode guns
and saving it in a special database.
I could use this database to identify which boxes had been
checked out, to whom, and on what date.
On Thursday, I started manually changing the
“Actual Location” in the new system to the person the box was checked
out to (bearing in mind that the same box could have gone out and come
back and gone out again). It
took me an hour and 20 minutes to check out 95 boxes.
On Friday, I discovered that I could use Global Updating to do
this function. This time, I
got through five days’ worth of check outs in one day.
But even at that rate, it would be weeks before I could catch up
with “reality”. In the
meantime, the guys in the warehouse were checking out more and more
boxes every day.
On Saturday, I realized that there might be a
better way. Using the
database’s export feature and the new system’s import utility, I updated
94 boxes in three minutes and 58 seconds.
Compare that to Thursday, and I think that’s quite a process
improvement. I had 2880
boxes updated in just over two hours, during which time I was able to go
out and get some lunch.
As the warehouse guys in “Livermore” and “Hobby”
continue to check boxes out, I can now keep up with them in the new
system by importing each day’s checkouts the next morning.
So far, so good.
An even bigger problem is the more than 10,000
boxes that have been barcode-scanned onto shelves in “Livermore” alone,
plus “Hobby”, of course. I
was beginning to worry that I was going to have to “volunteer” everyone
in “Livermore” to manually update the “Actual Location” on all of these
boxes. I had tested
importing and determined that it couldn’t be done that way.
However, by working with the vendor all this week,
we finally got the barcodes for locations to work in the system.
And, as of this afternoon, I had
scanned five boxes onto their shelves and updated them in the new
system. The locations took.
Only 14,000+ to go.
With luck, we might get all this “history” in sync with “reality” and be
ready to officially leave the old system behind and begin using the new
system by next week.
This will be welcome news to the Users, whom I have
already begun training. We
had training in “Pleasant Hill” all day Tuesday and again tomorrow.
A plus was that “Jeannie” was working in “Pleasant Hill”
yesterday and was able to join me for lunch.
Of course, once we get into the new system, the
Users will be clamoring for specialized report formats.
The work is far from over, but there is a light at the end of the
tunnel.
And it no longer looks like an oncoming train.
Love, as always,
Pete
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