RE: Interactive Response Time -- MIDRANGE-L


JT:

   Yes, that's us (www.phdinc.com).  And we are privately held so I can't talk
   about our annual sales.

   I can focus on the Ops Nav/Mgt Central view from here, if you want to look at
   the Performance Tools side.

All:

I appreciate everyone's advice about how to deal with the President (yes, I
report directly to him), but I don't want to get into that discussion as that
would take us way off topic.  I will just say that he has a genuine, legitimate
concern.  He is not an unreasonable guy, but he does expect me to bring him
solutions, not problems.

We have been running JDE for about two year now with the general guideline of
limiting the amount of JDE code we change.  We have not followed that guideline
very well (does anybody?) but the enhancements we have made have been primarily
focused on functions and features, not improving response time.  Most of the
functions and features emergencies have been taken care of, so now it is time
for us to change our focus to the response time issues.  I knew we would get
there eventually and the Pres has just given us a reason to change our focus.

I hope no one is offended if I don't quote each response.  (I can't spend *all*
day doing this.)

Phil



   Message: 2
   From: "jt" <jt@ee.net>
   To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
   Subject: RE: Interactive Response Time
   Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 00:27:38 -0500
   Reply-To: midrange-l@midrange.com

   Phil,

   Ya.. Tom got it extremely right...  (Just saw Jim Franz' post.. same...!)

   I was inspired, by these posts, to take a look at your company's website...
   I assume you're from PHD, Inc. "Solutions for Industrial Automation"...
   Didn't spend but a few minutes, but I gather you're worldwide.. very wide
   range of products I don't understand.. in business for 40 years...  Appears
   that you're not a distributor, but a design and manufacturing company.  No
   way to guess sales, and didn't want to see if the family-founders have taken
   the company public, or not.  I'd guess anywhere between $50M and $500M, but
   websites can give an appearance of a larger company than what it actually
   is.  Anyhoo...  If that's you, I'm surprised your President has time for
   this issue...

   ...Well, he doesn't...

   I imagine he was grabbed by the necktie, by an extremely irate user.
   However, it is of no matter whether this is an extremely isolated case, or
   worse yet, the tip of the iceberg.  The extent of the problem can be
   tracked, a number of ways.  You can find out where the bulk of the problems
   are coming from, fairly quickly, I'd think.  Long-running batch-like jobs,
   record locks, JDE (could be causing both), other...


   If your President is like some I've run across, he's got dozens and dozens
   of issues like this to deal with, at all times.  (Not to mention the bigger
   issues Presidents typically deal with.)  And he probably doesn't
   particularly care to deal with the computer issues.

   He may, or may not, take an interest in all the details that go into this
   decision.  But if you get to take Tom's suggestion of a few demonstrations
   of the problem(s) you can accomplish a lot.  I would add that you might want
   to have your own ideas about how to fix the problem, but it would be a great
   idea to ask your President how he'd want to deal with the situations.

   Because whether or not he understands anything more about computers after
   the demo, he would have an opportunity to see:

   a) There are contrary objectives
   b) Various ways of balancing these objectives
   c) Several specific causes and solutions
   d) The solutions all have costs, some more easily defined than others


   BTW, Phil, do you report TO the President?  Or were you grabbed by the
   necktie at random?...;D

   jt