New England B.S. Thread

The returns I don't, usually, but I need to keep them so I can search them if customers dispute that we've picked tires up, so they autofile. The orders I have to check each one individually to make sure there's no tires on the order that are being transferred or backordered.

 

Gotcha. Makes sense.

 

It'd be nice if our IT department could set it up so that the orders with backorders or transfers would automatically flag themselves, but they claim that it's impossible with our system. So we're stuck checking every. Single. Order. Manually.

 

That blows right there. You would think with all the tech, it could be done...

 

Depending on the software it might not be possible, or at least cost prohibitive to do.

 

It does.

That's the problem, right there. The website is the same basic unit (with updates/upgrades) that they've been using since day 1 of launching it back in the early 2000's. The only way to add some features now I guess would be to scrap it and start from scratch with a modern platform, apparently. There's been a couple of suggested changes that we've made to IT and they've said that they can't do it because the website isn't capable of handling it.

 

172 emails so far.

 

I'm sure it can be. Just depends if they're willing to pay anyone to do it. There's a lot of things that could be done more efficiently at my work with our system, but no one seems interested in making that happen.

 

I hate computer systems. Ours works great untill you actually need it to work.

 

I love to hate them. It's my livelihood, I'm an IT Systems Infrastructure Architect

 

Jason you do realize that Eammon is IT for your company don't you? \/\/\/

 

Yep, my teachers don't get that. Latest thing was complaining that their class attendance doesn't auto-populate with the daily attendance. It's there, it's even on the same page. They just don't like that it doesn't automatically fill in for them. Got a lot of "it worked that way in my last district". Yup, because they have a full time office attendance person manually keying the daily attendance into each class period. That's a waste of resources and we're not doing it, sorry.

 

Yeah, that's a little ridiculous. Although, could every student be automatically set to 'in class' and then they would just have to select the ones that aren't in class? I guess that may not be the best process though. Teachers may skip over kids that aren't in class.

 

I Wish I knew more about IT. I’m always told it was a simple 5 minute fix. Seems to get around the issue it takes me 30mins and a flash drive

Then again I must put off a weird electro magnetic pulse when in pissed. Even the copier and fax shits out when I touch it.

 

Oh, they are already set to "in class". They don't have to mark students present, only absences. If everyone's there, they just open attendance and hit submit.

 

Then never mind. I'll stick with my first "Yeah, that's a little ridiculous". Even more so now!

 

Yup. They want to not have to do it. Know what would happen if it automatically marked daily absences? They'd open it and hit submit without looking every period every day. At least some of them would anyway, but I bet it would be the majority.

 

But I have nothing to do with IT budget. The whole process is so convoluted it'll make your head spin. In order for the Warehouse Management System (WMS) that Jason deals with to get upgraded, at a very high level, the items below need to all fall in place and happen. The whole process below, for an enterprise our size takes a minimum 1-1.5 years.

1. The business (Logistics Management in this case) identifies a need
2. Specific application functional requirements are identified
3. Possible vendors are identified based on requirements
4. Proof of concept (POC) run
5. Software selected or choices narrowed down
6. Request for Quote (RFQ) sent to vendors
7. Budget set and funds allocated (This is the point where a lot of projects fall flat, the department doesn't always have the budget to do everything they want to do)
8. Project Request submitted to Enterprise IT Services
9. Application architecture completed
10. Infrastructure architecture completed
11. Infrastructure build completed
12. Application build completed
13. Application testing and user training
14. Application go-live

Edit: Yeah, and each step above also involves at least one or more unique groups within the organization.

 

I thought that's how all technology functions

 

I know.

I think as far as WMS goes, somewhere along the ladder, someone sees the system as working "good enough", and couldn't be bothered to improve it. I see a lot of things get half implemented and abandoned not long after.