

How to replace 30 laptops (and $10,000) with 150 sheets of paper - alxp
http://ruk.ca/content/how-replace-30-laptops-and-10000-150-sheets-paper

======
chime
At my old programming job, people would come up to me all the time asking if I
could write programs to automate business processes. One day someone called a
meeting to discuss a new software system that would help prevent incorrect box
labels from being stuck on finished goods. She explained that the problem was
that label designs change frequently and sometimes older, expired labels get
used instead of the new labels. Mistakes like that are expensive to rectify
and though we have many failsafes in place (lot tracking with expiration,
multiple QC inspection stages etc.), the only surefire way to prevent errors
would be to compare the customer-approved "Master" label for each production
job with one of the printed sticky labels before a job starts.

Her group's suggestion was that I build a simple system that maintains an
electronic catalog of all the Master labels for all the production jobs, and
before each job is run, a production employee would scan in a sample of the
printed box labels. Then my system could do its magic and let the employee
know if the Master label matches the printed label. If so, they can continue
with production.

As I listened to their request, cogs were already starting to turn in my
brain: CRUD system to manage Master labels, versioning for each label,
preassigning Masters to specific jobs based on customer approval, scanning
labels from the manufacturing area, graphical diff. with auto-orientation
matching, and documenting/validating this entire system. Hmm. Let's see if
there is an easier way.

Me: Why can't the production employees compare the labels by just looking at
them?

Her: Because sometimes it's just a few sentences or design elements that
change. It's easy to miss and has happened a few times.

Me: Who provides us the Master labels?

Her: The customer. And we make it a part of the production paperwork well-in-
advance and get it approved by the customer so there is never a mixup on the
Master itself.

Me: Sounds logical. How are the sticky labels printed?

Her: Depends. We may print them ourselves if it's just a few hundred or get
them printed by label vendors for large quantities. We may reuse them in
multiple jobs and so may warehouse them for future use.

Me: So before every production job, someone goes to the warehouse, looks for a
stack of printed labels in the racks by Item# / Bin#, and brings them back to
the production room?

Her: Yes. And that's when errors happen. They might bring back the wrong
version of the label and not realize it. Or people in the previous shift might
have returned unused labels into the wrong bin etc.

Me: OK. So just to recap, our production team can get the correct Master label
every time because it is part of the paperwork already approved by the
customer, but errors happen because there could be 10 very similar versions of
the same label in the warehouse and the employee might pick the wrong one.

Her: Correct.

Me: One way to prevent such errors would be to add Version# to every lot of
every label item we have in the warehouse and have the barcode scanners block
movement of incorrect versions, however that requires a tremendous effort of
data-entry, programming, and training.

Her: Absolutely. That's why we just want to compare the Master with the
printed samples automatically.

Me: What size are these Master labels in?

Her: Centered on regular 8.5x11.

Me: And the printed labels are also centered on 8.5x11 and same size as the
Master labels?

Her: Yes.

Me: What if the prodution employee photocopies the Master label to a
transparency sheet and overlays it on the printed labels? I know we have
copiers in the area.

 _silence_

 _everyone looks at each other and nods in agreement_

Her: That'll work. Thanks everyone. Let's get some lunch.

~~~
esc
I'm quite impressed that your suggestion was accepted, in the company where I
work this would never happen.

An example: I was asked to build a system to keep track of daily tasks of one
of our teams, and to make sure all scheduled tasks were assigned to someone.
As I was listening to them, I suddenly realized that the magnetic white-board
on the meeting room wall was all they needed. I drew a table with team-members
names and weekdays and used the magnets as tasks.

After some silence the team supervisor said it would work, but would not be
used because: a) it looks 'unprofessional'; b) it's 'insecure' because someone
could mess up the magnets by accident

After some emails between my manager and them my colleague was ordered to
build the system, he ended up spending about 3 weeks on it :)

~~~
chime
It was a relatively small company and people really tried their best to solve
problems in efficient ways. I think they missed the obvious solution purely by
chance.

------
F_J_H
Reminds me of this story:

[http://www.lixo.org/archives/2008/07/21/networks-are-
smart-a...](http://www.lixo.org/archives/2008/07/21/networks-are-smart-at-the-
edges/)

A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes,
without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set
up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how
difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every
single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in
the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean
you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so
that customers all the way down the supermarket don’t get pissed off and buy
someone else’s product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got
the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new
project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve
their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too
stretched to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated,
RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a
fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the
project had a great time. They solved the problem by using some high-tech
precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a
toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone
had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button
when done.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project:
amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the
scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining
market share. “That’s some money well spent!” – he says, before looking
closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three
weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day,
so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it,
and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was
actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because
all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the
line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there
was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over
every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.

~~~
zwieback
If you think the moral of the story is that $8M were wasted due to bad
management or whatever you'd be wrong. The scales were a success because they
enabled the desk fan solution. Manufacturing line operators are very clever
but they don't necessarily have the right incentive. The loss to the company
wasn't visible but the horns and flashing lights were.

I used to build inspection systems for manufacturing lines and we'd frequently
build expensive (not $8M, though) vision systems, E-Testers, etc. just to
uninstall them a year or two later when the process or automation guys had
found a way to prevent problems from happening in the first place.

~~~
billswift
If not "bad management", what _would_ you call that kind of mismatch of
incentives?

~~~
zwieback
Ok, good point. A better way to incent is to offer bounties for yield
improvements. Most manufacturing outfits I've seen have those but they are
probably too low.

Here's another problem mentioned in the article, in fact it's maybe the real
problem: the engineers "who were already stretched too thin" probably didn't
talk to their operators and technicians often enough. When I was a
manufacturing engineer I noticed how much I learned about the stuff I was
building by simply hanging around the operators for significant amounts of
time. Not only did I get a lot of information about the subtle ways my systems
were failing, I also learned that the operators generally felt engineering was
ignoring their concerns. Just listening and trying to make the operators' life
better earned me so much cooperation from the floor I later had no problems
getting them to try out new things for me and providing me feedback on
"improvements".

------
T-hawk
The professor for my software engineering course in college posed a problem
with a non-tech answer similarly.

You have a cabin in the woods, with electricity and a freezer. You go hunting
and bag a deer with much more meat than can be used in one visit, so you
freeze it for use on a future visit. But you want to know while you are away
if the electricity fails for any length of time so that the meat may have
thawed and spoiled.

After the class spent most of a period arguing over remote monitoring systems
and temperature sensors and the like, the professor revealed the simple
answer. Freeze a block of ice in the freezer and mark its height. If it is
shorter when you return, the power was out so some of it melted.

~~~
ssharp
There is an anecdote I've read a few times:

"During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major
problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space.
NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the "Astronaut
Pen". Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial
market.

The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.

They used a pencil."

The idea is to show outcome-oriented thinking. The desired outcome wasn't to
use a pen, but rather, to simply write or record.

~~~
jonknee
That anecdote happens to be false though. The Astronaut Pen was made
independently of NASA and was sold to them (and Russia) like it's sold to the
public. Wood pencils pose trouble in zero-g (graphite dust, broken tips,
flammable wood, etc).

<http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp>

~~~
ssharp
I knew that the anecdote was false and forgot to add that. The point wasn't to
show up NASA or research. The point was to show outcome-oriented thought.

~~~
jonknee
It was still very poor outcome-oriented thought. There are dangers associated
with pencils that are solved by a pen. Space flight's outcome should be
safety, so regardless the answer won't end up being a pencil.

~~~
ssharp
I think it still works fine as a basic metaphor to help illustrate the idea.
The metaphor doesn't need to be 100% inline to do that and expecting it to
seems a bit pedantic.

Speaking of pedantic, a flight's outcome is not really safety, nor was space
flight what the folklore mentions. It was addressing the requirement to
write/record in space.

------
orangecat
The building I work in installed a kiosk as the office directory. Normally
there's a screen saver running; after touching the screen you get a static
list of the 10 business occupants and their floors. I'm not convinced this was
the best use of resources.

~~~
timerickson
...but boy, oh boy is that screensaver interesting!

------
ctdonath
Worth recalling "The Breakfast Food Cooker"
<http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~do_while/toaster.htm>

------
jtchang
It's refreshing to see a non tech solution every now and then. As
technologists we have to learn when and when not to apply technology
solutions. This just happens to be one of those cases.

~~~
tzs
When I took the intro digital logic course at Caltech in the late '70s or
early '80s, the textbook had a chapter at the end called something like "The
Engineer as Dope Pusher" that urged engineers to not get carried away by
technology.

An example he gave was designing a timer for a clothes dryer. The user needs
to be able to specify how long to try the clothes. The dryer should run for
that long and stop.

The standard solution was a mechanical timer. It had a dial. The consumer
turned the dial to the appropriate time, the dryer started, and when the timer
ticked down the dryer stopped.

Engineers were starting to replace these with digital solutions. The digital
solution was a lot more fun for the engineer. He'd get to design some
circuitry, maybe use a microprocessor. He'd need a power supply for the
electronics. He could have buttons and a nifty LED display. Maybe have
preprogrammed drying times.

That's a hell of a lot more fun for the engineer than to just specify sticking
some commodity mechanical timer in there like his father and grandfather would
have done.

However, the mechanical timer is cheaper, easier to build into the dryer, more
reliable, and easier to use for the consumer. There is no advantage whatsoever
to the consumer or the dryer company in using the custom digital solution--it
serves no purpose other than the entertain the engineer who designs it.

~~~
whatusername
If the custom digital solution looks newer/fancier/better on the showroom
floor then there is an advantage to the dryer company.

------
dhughes
Good idea, not everything has to use a computer just because we have them.

It's only 150 sheets of paper too it's not like it's reams of the stuff (it's
just about 1/4 of a ream) otherwise people would be tempted to use a laptop to
be 'green'.

Local guy makes it to HN. And I'll be voting in October.

------
orofino
Interesting, reminds me of a practical exam we had in intro to programming
class that was taught in Java. We were asked to implement a FIFO data
structure class with methods push and pop (something along these lines).

We'd just learned about OO principles and extending classes the week before.
After reading the task for the practical I nervously raised my hand, "Would it
be acceptable to just extend array list and create methods just named as
described but using the existing methods?" The teacher kind of looked at me
blankly and said yes.

I was the first person finished, no one else apparently thought of that
approach. I'm not a programmer, but given that we'd just discussed this days
before it seemed like an obvious solution...

~~~
mmatants
The exam was probably mostly about the algorithms involved in managing FIFO
data. Whether you extend an array list or create a custom class wrapping a
buffer does not change the algorithm. Hence the blank look from the teacher.

~~~
Jach
Keyword there being exam. I think that's a great approach for a high-enough
level course; that is, let the students do whatever they want with whatever
language they want in the assignments (hard to generalize a build-test-diff
system though for submissions), then test concepts on the test.

I have a friend in a Python intro whose assignment was to make a program
encrypting user input with the Caesar Cipher and (optionally) decrypting, and
optionally supporting ROT13 as well. I'm pretty sure the teacher wanted them
using ord(), chr(), for loops, etc., but the solution I suggested after my
friend tried that way is much simpler:

    
    
        import string
        normal = 'abcd...ABCD...'
        caesar = 'defg...DEFG...'
        caesar_table = string.maketrans(normal, caesar)
        reverse_caesar_table = string.maketrans(caesar, normal)
        msg.translate(caesar_table) # for encryption
        msg.translate(reverse_caesar_table) # for decryption
    

Add in string.ascii_letters, string.ascii_uppercase, string.ascii_lowercase,
and collections.deque (for string rotation) to generalize the alphabet sets,
it was all very simple. And used a completely different 'algorithm' of a
translation table that's done in C and performs super-fast, easily handles
non-ascii characters (since the translation just leaves them alone), easily
generalizable to whatever simple encryption scheme, etc.

Of course my friend doesn't want to learn programming therefore everything's
complicated and she doesn't remember anything and even after 6 months which
ends in a couple weeks I doubt she could do FizzBuzz. :(

------
mkramlich
paper & pencil can handle exceptional cases and ad hoc formats much better
than software, that's for sure. one reason I still love notebooks like
Moleskine, and blank scrap paper. Old tech: it's cheap and Just Works (tm).

~~~
thebooktocome
Moleskine is hardly cheap.

~~~
mkramlich
depends on perspective

    
    
      cheapo paper notebook:   $1
      Moleskine:              $10
      iOS device:            $200 - $700 plus opt $30-100/mo (forget cur rates)
    

Yes, I know you can do more with an iPad/iPhone, obvious, but there is some
overlap and paper is arguably better in certain common use cases. Always use
the best tool for the job. And I have way greater confidence that the content
of my Moleskines will be around in 10 years, than the content of my
iPhone/iPad/PC/Mac. And no company can shut me out of it.

~~~
thebooktocome
I'm certainly not arguing that iPhone/iPad is better.

I have cheapo paper notebooks from ten years ago. I don't understand how
Moleskines are better.

------
romaniv
This goes to show that a good designer or engineer is not just someone who
"solves the problem", but someone who considers alternate solutions and solves
the problem in the most efficient way that is practically feasible.

Unfortunately, it's often the case that no one thinks about it until the
"default" way of solving the problem becomes pretty much impossible to use.

------
zwieback
Oregonian here - all our voting is by mail, no technology needed to route
voters.

------
daedhel
This is true, unless the move to technology was a way to control the results
of the poll...

------
lwhi
Isn't this how most polls work?

At least, AFAIK, they work this way in the UK.

------
chopsueyar
Cannot wait for the IPO.

------
jcarreiro
Why not just have everyone vote on their iPhone?

~~~
mikle
If you are really serious, does that mean that the county must provide iPhones
to those that <GASP> don't have one?

~~~
jcarreiro
I was being a bit facetious, yes. But voting electronically would solve this
problem, assuming that you could trust the voting software!

Public terminals could be provided for citizens without computers/smart
phones/netbooks/tablets/implants/whatever.

~~~
jcarreiro
Just curious: am I being voted down for suggesting that a society use
electronic voting? If so, oh, the irony!

~~~
archangel_one
I imagine you've been downvoted (not by me) because it was an overly
simplistic answer - it's obviously not as easy as "have everyone vote
electronically". The various debacles with voting machines over the past few
years have shown that you can't simply assume the software is trustworthy, let
alone having people dialling in to vote on their own phone.

And the point of the article was that more technology may not always be the
best solution...

------
Bud
Whoa. That paper stuff could really catch on! Perhaps someone could print a
Bible on it.

(editing this comment after downvoting to add content, and my apologies for
being sarcastic and content-free): Effective data presentation, graphic design
and such are technology. Showing all the data at once is often much more
effective than hiding it in an invisible database.

