Re: Generating PC file formats from AS/400 data

Management Attention was dramatically refocused when we had an ABC analysis 
several years ago & I believe we are long overdue for another ... I think 
every company should have one of these at least every 5 years, also a 
security audit & a few other such things.

Basically each person was asked to fill out a form ... huw much of each day 
spend doing various kinds of tasks, or working on particular applications, 
and how much of it seems to be wasted due to them not having optimal tools to 
do their job efficiently ... the survey started with some suggested areas 
associated with the alleged job function of each worker & some expected 
possibilities like

Fixing that ***** printer;
Waiting on that ***** printer;
Waiting on the computer screen due to degradation or lock up;
Looking up data that needs to be keyed in;
Studying documentation trying to figure out how to do something;
Reading one of Al's long winded explanations;
Analysing data to track down errors, then fixing them;

Then the user might add to the list.

One big surprise to Management was in the area of applications that cross 
departmental lines.  A whole string of people do some things in which the hit 
in each department is minor, but when added up, many hours a day was being 
consumed ... previous to the ABC study, the kinds of projects MIS had been 
working on were the top 1-3 per department in terms of serve all departments 
& satisfy their top needs, but after the ABC study I now worked on some 
projects that translated to saving the company more time than from the 
department by department perspective.

Another thing that has been somewhat helpful more recently is a notion of 
continuing education for the whole company, in stages by level & location.  
So for example, we had someone in to one facility teaching our factory 
supervisors how to make the best use of our ERP reports & screens in getting 
their job done.  Various people would describe their problems & quite often 
there was a report that solves that.  Then the same educator went off & did 
the same assistance to our other factories.  The last time we did this was 
over 10 years ago ... far too long ago in my opinion.  There is turn-over, 
and software enhancement, and business changes, and people get promoted from 
the jobs they were trained in to tasks needing different education.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©

>  From:    markallen@kellyskids.com (Mark Allen)
>  
>  I agree with you but it is an issue that has yet to get mgmt's attention,
>  (although it is going to when they see how much time we are spending
>  supporting n+1 platforms, software, etc.
>  
>  Mark Allen
>  
>    -----Original Message-----
>    Subject: RE: Generating PC file formats from AS/400 data
>  
>  
>    Mark:
>  
>    I think that the sentence, "we have a large % of not-so-computer-literate
>  users (and that's another completely different issue)" is not right.  Your
>  collection of "not so computer literate users" and their collection of
>  machines and software is the real issue.  All of those people have not
>  enough training.  The entire problem vanishes if you standardize on 
software
>  and training.  At that point, it would be easy to improve everyone's
>  situation with once change applied to 1,000 places instead of dozens of
>  changes applied to dozens of places.
>  
>    In my experience, you will be lucky (not clever) if you can solve this
>  problem with technology.  I suspect that the moderate application of some
>  hard work will fix this in a much more satisfactory way.
>    Richard Jackson


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