How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 49. Debra

My friend Debra is a consultant. In 2005, she visited a large publishing company for a routine checkup that she schedules for six months after helping a client go live with a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Things were in pretty good shape, so it was a pretty easy engagement. The company’s biggest issue had been some slow queries in the General Ledger. She fixed those by creating a new index.

When she asked whether there was anything else she could do to help, the manager she’d been working with said no, but the clerk who sat behind him said, “I have a problem.” The manager seemed embarrassed, but Debra pressed the clerk, and he continued, “Every day I throw away reams of paper from our invoice listing.”

Debra asked to look at the job request in the application. The job request ran a program to print an invoice list every day at a scheduled time. On the schedule screen, she found a checkbox labeled “Increment date on each run.” Checked, the program would list only the invoices entered since the last time the program ran. Unchecked, the program would list all the invoices that had ever been created on the system. The checkbox was, oops, unchecked.

So, every day, the company had been listing every invoice that had ever been created since day one of the project. On day two, when the program listed twice as many invoices as it had on day one, it wouldn’t have been a big enough problem to notice. But a couple months in, the reports would have been 50+ ...