I worked at a "warehouse in transition". A serious error that I
observed was that broke the old system before they understood the
practical function of the new system. Also, they did not communicate
well with the suppliers and work out a more reliable delivery
schedule. There response to the problem was even worse, in my
opinion. They then lied to the customers. They would say, sorry, we
did not deliver. It will be here in 2 days when they had no idea when
it would arrive. My inclination was to work out contigency plans
with the customers, but that approach was rejected. Of course the
systems themselves had problems, but I tend to look at that sort of
thing as being inevitable, I attribute them to “the software and
hardware gods”, but the communication problems were completely our
fault (in my opinion).
As for the system, you only get out of it what you put into it. A
computer system should allow you put in the costs and benefits of
events, probability distributions, and other inputs that would allow
the system to make better predictions. And the costs of each event
have to be accurately calculated with sufficient precision to make the
predictions useful. The computer systems I have seen make mindless
predictions that are based on history. Systems also fail by being
“to flexible”, you should never assume something is going to happen
unless it is automatic, and if left to give a guess unaided, most
people will resort to raw guesses, at least part of the time. |
