April 12, 2000
Dear Everyone:
Work on getting the thousands of boxes set to
locations in the old system to the same locations in the new system
continues. I spent another
9-½ hour Saturday last weekend manipulating data from the old system and
importing it into the new system.
Once I figured out how I could get the data into the right
format, I was able to do an import instead of having three guys clamber
all over the warehouse scanning barcodes.
Terrific time-saver there.
Of course, there were rejects this time because the
new system is not quite as forgiving as the old system.
In the old system, if you said, “The box is in Row 33, Bay 1,
Shelf 4,” the system would check that location for room for the box.
If there wasn’t any room, or if the location didn’t exist at all,
the system would give you a warning (“Danger,
Will Robinson!”), but it would still record the “location” and
accept the box. The new
system doesn’t allow that.
Now, it turns out that the warehouse guys have
developed a little trick to help them deal with the fact that the
warehouse is bulging at the seams and there just isn’t enough space for
all the boxes that keep pouring in from all directions.
What is this “little trick”?
They just create imaginary rows with a device they call a
“scone”.
I know what you’re thinking.
“A scone is a
square piece of cake often served with butter and tea in
England.
You can also pay an enormous price for what the coffee shops call
‘scones’. Or we could be
talking about a
big stone that was stolen from Scotland by
Edward I
in 1296. But what does that
have to do with imaginary rows in a warehouse?”
It turns out there’s another kind of “scone”.
This consists of a box lid (which is sort of square, like a real
scone) with a Row-Bay-Shelf barcode label stuck to the top of it.
The guys fill up a pallet with about 40 boxes, then place the
“scone” on top. They scan
the “scone” barcode, then scan all the box barcodes.
Then they download the information into the system, which records
that all those boxes are sitting on that imaginary “shelf”.
Then they park the pallet down at the end of a real Row, for the
time being.
This worked pretty well for them in the old system.
But the new system flat out says, “I don’t have to take no
stinking ‘scones’ from you,” and rejects all the boxes because the
imaginary Row doesn’t exist.
So there.
The solution?
My fellow systems support specialist figured out how to create
the imaginary Rows in the new system.
One of the guys goes out, scans the “scone” and the boxes and
downloads them into the new system.
The new system now accepts the boxes.
Everybody’s happy and the boxes are still sitting on pallets
against the wall and the imaginary Row still doesn’t exist.
Nevertheless, the two systems are coming closer and
closer together, not unlike docking a couple of space stations to each
other. The only real problem
is the “Hobby” Records Center, where the staff is still grimly hanging
on to the old system. They
want to continue downloading into the old system, then have me export
the data from the old system, to import into the new system.
Then I send them the rejects and they want to download that into
the old system, for me to export…
yada yada yada.
This is not unexpected.
They did the exact same thing the last time we converted from one
system to another. Some
people just don’t take well to change until you turn a fire hose on
them.
Even with that in mind, I’m hopeful that we will be
completely into the new system by next week.
I can always just cut off “Hobby”’s access to the old system if I
have to.
And I finally found out why the guys called the
box-tops “scones”.
Apparently, when one of them tried to explain that the process was to
“scan and download” the data, bearing in mind that English is not always
a first language around here, it got abbreviated to “sca-own-” the data.
That’s how new terminology begins.
On the home front, I just logged onto my bank
account to discover that both of my
tax refunds have already been deposited to my account.
I’m now $2400 richer than I thought I was.
And my car loan will be paid off by the end of next month.
Maybe it’s time to start thinking about moving up to a new car.
I sure like “Marshall’s”
Acura.
Love, as always,
Pete
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