Thirty-nine Steps

NEW URINALS!

OK, this is pretty big news, considering we have waited for about 4 months for the installation of 6 new urinals. The previous set had caused numerous floods and other unhappy moments (including having to run before getting your feet wet). Just when we were about to go on strike because of lack of sanitary facilities, some workmen started disassembling the old ones. The whole department screamed with joy (well half of it anyway). But alas, it still lasted weeks before everything was in place. A team to demolish, a team to install new plumbing, a team to plaster, a team to put new tiles and finally a team to put the cherry on the cake: install the old urinals on their new “back-end business logic”. Ultra-cool automatic flushes with infrared eyes, all independently steered by not to high water pressure! The previous ones had been all 6 at once by means of a counter that counted heads passing by an eye, with water pressure high enough to blast away the wall of the neighboring women’s toilets.

Sorry I had to share this, but all the men here are filled with joy now. So much that some don’t even mind about the Urinal Etiquette any longer!

In the first article we were looking for the real purpose of the document, whereas here, the author takes us on a quest for the deeper meaning of the objects that are going to be tracked by the system.

You will notice that this study uses the terms customer order, object on order, vehicle and truck. This is done on purpose: it doesn’t really matter what the tracking object is, the original customer order like the FO-order, or the real truck or bus by chassis number, or a spare frame, or CKD (Completely Knocked Down truck), or an extra order for equipment, or an engine…

Or a washing machine for that matter. The author clearly tries to tell us that this is a generic system, fitted for all, although probably at the time of writing was not aware of the word generic. I especially like the term object on order, although I don’t immediate link it to a truck-factory, which was probably the original purpose of using the term after all.

The goal of my PPOCOTS series is to write the ultimate blurb, one sentence, a synthesis of the entire 17 page document, with no loss of info, and of course, no redundant info either. So far I have: “A PPOCOST is a system to track objects on orders in a generic way”.
Next episode: something about processes.

Principles of a Process Oriented Customer Order Tracking System. I found this document during the latest department move, a half-yearly event where a bunch of guys just starts moving our desk, thus rendering us incapable of productive activity. This particular document caught my attention because of its author: my boss-boss-boss, the same one after which this blog is titled. Although written in 1996, I’m sure much of it is still valid on the present day. I’ll start this PPOCOTS series with a random quote from the document, just to illustrate the clear and vulgar style (relating to the common people) in which it is written:

The PROPER prestudy typically reflects the current systems and the current way of working, even if there has been an attempt to redirect and simplify the current tower of Babel. Therefor the prestudy is a good starting point to find out what the problem is.

Clearly, the author tries to tell us (the reader) that this is not the document we are looking for if we don’t know what the problem is. Instead we should read the PROPER prestudy which is an entirely other document after all, in a far more formal style:

The Principles document refers to a general approach of the matter, more or less regardless of the kind of product being tracked, hence the more general name Customer Orders.

For example: washing machines, which in principle have a lot of common characteristics with trucks. They are being built.