It Was Spring 2005
In the spring of 2005, I arrived in Braintree, Massachusetts for the first visit of my new consulting customer, Windsor Park. Windsor Park was a precious metals and rare coiner dealer that purportedly served as the liaison between auctions and wealthy individuals throughout the country. The office was tucked away in a business park that contained dozens of offices for “Acmes”, CPAs and the general, vanilla environment you would expect. Windsor Park was owned and operated by Arnie Waters, an eccentric Bostonian that wore his Harvard affiliation on his sleeve proudly. There were a handful of older sales people and a delightfully bubbly office manager, Stephanie St. Angelo, whom I became friends with almost immediately, especially since she knew all the good bakery spots from her hometown of Providence to Boston (and it showed on both of us).
I was hired to start a fire with the sales staff, whom resembled a stable of tired and worn race horses; they’d seen better days of inspiration. Additionally, I was tasked with integration of technology that accompanied the protocol, such as a decent CRM system, asset/inventory management systems and other tools that I saw fit to better the overall process’ of the office. Overtime, this was achieved to a great success in both sales and protocol. If the reader will indulge me, so much so that the first full-focus month achieved the highest sales in the twenty year history of the firm. This was done with the help of good software as the backbone, aiding in effective and efficient practices. I could not have been more proud and gladly accepted a summary meeting to conclude this adventure with Mr. Waters.
As I walked into his office, I noticed that there were six, taped tags in a row that were marked “Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday”, and “Friday”, with a last tag as “Sat/Sun”. On the horizontal axis below this seeming columns, similar tags were marked “AM” and “PM”. Pulling out an envelope, Arnie thanked me for the good work and handed me the last payment. Within these columns where 3×5 notecards with customer contact information and dated notes.
“Jonathan, I appreciate what you’ve done. That Salesforce stuff is certainly slick and making sense of the dBaseIV stuff has really helped the asset management side of things…”
I was pretty pleased with the work and had already thought of its use on a case study for the next customer.
“….but I’d like to show you something that I’ve been using for thirty-years. You see, I do love the technology you brought, but with these cards, I don’t run out of power. If I call a guy and he tells me to call him Thursday, I just move it to “Thursday…”
With that, he moved a stack of cards from Monday to Thursday, faster than one could type.
“…also, if I have to take a trip, I can simply grab them all and snap, they are transferred to my pocket.”
He then scooped-up the remaining cards from this morning and placed them into his pocket.
“I’m not saying ‘no’ to your asset management and customer management software, I’m just saying ‘sometimes the old ways are better’”.
I suppose I could have argued “data loss” potential or other flaws with the notecards, but he did have a point. Sometimes we over-engineer solutions beyond their effectiveness. And I never forgot that lesson.
Asset Management Tools and Toys
I love fancy software. The more dynamic charts, colors and blinking lights, the happier I become. Going to the annual SolidWorks World conference is a highlight I love. I’m just waiting for someone to develop asset management 3D goggles that teleports you into a virtual file-room where you can pull files like “Minority Report”. This, of course, would truly be ridiculous and is the reason I began this discussion with a short story. There have been wonderful advancements in asset management that do truly add to effective efficiencies. There have been some real losers as well.
My top choices for advancements would most certainly be OCR (Optical Character Recognition) APIs, as they allow easy scanning of legacy data into usable data as well as some of the ease-of-use functions in modern day asset management tools. For a bit of fun, my top losers are as follows:
- 3D rendering in general – some over-ambitious acquisition departments of IBM Maximo have acquired divisions that add 3D renderings of objects within the asset management software. If you don’t know what a screw looks like, perhaps you should go apply for the human resources department’s open roles. I won’t even get into the topic of 3D room renderings for asset management checks.
- Non-exporting asset management software – believe it or not, some software companies don’t allow the user to export the collected data into sortable information. For example, PowerDB, a pillar of the electrical asset management environment, won’t allow the data to be exported into excel for manipulation and analysis/integration. The user can merely deliver to the end customer a .pdf of the information, which for your average industrial plant, may exceed eight hundred pages; not usable. Instead, if the end customer wants to be able to historically analysis the information, they must also purchase a site license and the data is transferred by PowerDB. The reason and motivation for this underperforming software should be clear.
- QR codes – there is a general over-use of QR codes. For small non-critical items, like candy bars brought to a POS system, it’s entirely appropriate and effective. For critical items, such as a room, roof system or circuit breaker, people don’t realize that they are doubling-up on data entry and expose error easily with a sticker on a panel.
- Using spreadsheets instead of database systems – painful as it is to say, this is extremely common. Many people don’t understand the difference in purpose between a database and a spreadsheet. However, I have seen some extremely creative ways to address the obvious conflict. Once while engaging with a large chemical company, I was given their “data” records on their electrical distribution equipment. Through obvious massive amounts of effort, the electrician had widened columns, bolded bordered, colored cells and danced all around with Excel to create an actual picture of the electrical panels. Truly amazing was the work, but also rendered truly worthless if you ever tried to “A-Z sort” this Picasso of Turbo Pascal.
