How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 8. The Shipping Labels Problem

None of the issues in Orange County seemed easy at first. Everything was confused and disorganized everywhere we looked. But a little bit of asking around identified a customer employee who knew about the printing problem. He and I paired up to go figure it out. The first thing I asked him was the “let’s look at the system” question of how long this process had been running. He showed me a form on the Oracle Manufacturing applications dashboard that showed job statuses, and it looked like the label printer job had completed a long time ago.

Well, that wasn’t much help, so now what?

“So, how do we know that the labels aren’t printing?” I asked.

“Because the guys down at the dock don’t have labels.”

“Can you take me to the dock?”

So off to the dock we went, to visit the symptom.

The dock was in the same building, just a two-minute walk away. It was physically configured like every other dock I had seen: warehouse over here, loading bays over there, with a staging area in between. Forklifts would bring pallets of boxes from the warehouse to the staging area for labeling, and then the drivers would load the boxes onto their trucks. The weird thing about this dock, though, was that nothing was moving. At least half a dozen drivers from UPS, FedEx, US Mail, DHL, and the warehouse employees were just sitting on the stacks of boxes, drinking coffee and talking about yesterday’s games.

“Why are these guys sitting around?” I asked.

“They can’t load ...