"Dr. Brian Church the operation director is responsible among other things for inventory levels in the company, setting inventory budget, for achievement inventory budget, for monitoring all aspects of inventory, age of inventory, for setting policy stock levels and all those sort of aspects".
I used the system for inventory management to understand what inventory we have it. I tend not use the system directly. There is one or two that I used. Usually I run a query, which I write myself which extracts information I want. I have macro set up there in a spreadsheet so that each month I can run the macro on the file and print it out whenever I want. It used to take me 3 and half hours to pro the produce the report. It’s more accurate, it’s a better form. I’m benefiting is that I can get the information I want. In 14 months, I’m beginning to think that a part of our implementation was probably done incorrectly. So, we used to plan manually and computerized it. And doing that is more accurate and reliable. It appears to me, and I’m not at the sharp end. I detached from it so what I say tends to be colored by that my people tell me, the problem is in the production area. There’s no question about that. My feeling is that, at the grass roots level not all the senior level, that the production people are not signed on to what we were doing. They are not committed to it, they don’t see it as theirs, and they feel it is something that has been forced on them. They don’t understand what the system is about; they don’t understand what we want to do with the system. Because of that it isn’t working in that area, and that’s causing problems at the interface with other department.
I think the problem is at the supervisor and manager level. When we are having a training session they didn’t turn up for a lot of them. Everybody told us that whatever training you do, you won’t do enough. The thing they didn’t tell us was that you’ve got to do the right sort of training. They just don’t know understand what we’re trying to do, what the system is meant to achieve. Because of that if they get a transaction wrong, they don’t understand that it’s going to come back and cause them a problem.
Since MIS took over before, I can’t say what other problems occur. At the beginning of the project, we said this is not an MIS projects, it’s a people projects. The manager was on the project team. It was no more; it was no less than anybody else. And since I took them over now, I said to them, you were involved as much as any department. As far as I concern, we will continue to be, that we want to continue to be capable of being upgraded as new releases come along. There is no such person, as analyst/programmers. As long as they are answered the problems/question given to them they don’t even tell how to solve it. Because they don’t understand the problems, but there thinking of ideas all the time, because that’s what programmers are. MIS respond to different department’s requirements without seeing the impact as a whole.
We need to get MIS under control, pull the reins in on some of the work that’s going on in there.
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