How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 9. More Grievances

Of course, fixing the label printing problem remedied only one of the forty-nine grievances (remedied is another legal term). There were forty-eight others. While I was in the warehouse looking at the label printer, my teammates were looking at other users’ grievances. Team 2 was researching why the application was taking an average of twenty minutes to return an order confirmation number. The impact of that one was astounding, too:

Our customer’s sales rep

“Thank you for calling, how may I help you?”

Our customer’s customer

“Hi, yes. I’d like to place this week’s $6,000,000 order. Here are the details…”

Sales rep

“Thank you for your order. Unfortunately, our new system is really slow right now. I’m going to need to put you on hold for a few minutes before I can issue your order confirmation ID.”

Buyers were getting sick of wasting half an hour every time they placed an order. Some of them were threatening to find a new supplier.

The Team 2 attack plan was, of course, the same as mine had been: to look at the problem from the user’s perspective. They did this by tracing the sales order program. Tracing shows in detail how a program spends its time. 

The trace showed that the program was awaiting the release of a lock that had been created by a custom sales report. The lock prevented anyone from inserting, updating, or deleting rows in the sales order table while the report was running. Since the report ran almost continuously during business hours ...