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The clerks at the warehouse I worked at spent 30 min-1 hour every day hand-collating order manifests because whatever system that spit them out (from some contr

by bsanr2 6y ago

The clerks at the warehouse I worked at spent 30 min-1 hour every day hand-collating order manifests because whatever system that spit them out (from some contractor or corporate?) did so as PDFs that couldn't be easily modified. Literally building packets that were similarly structured, every night, by hand. I did what I could with Excel macros to automate as much as I could, but I'm not a trained coder and I definitely didn't have security access to implement the tools that could have saved us huge headaches. I wondered quite a bit who the hell up top got paid to set up this process.

yellowapple 6y ago
Yep, sounds like a classic case of an ERP or order management system throwing documents over the wall because "well all the data's there, so the warehouse can figure it out". And as for "who got paid", probably some COBOL programmer who retired decades ago and is now living the dream entirely offline in a beach house in Costa Rica. Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.
perl4ever 6y ago
PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded. I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format. There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it. My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.

by bsanr2 6y ago

yellowapple 6y ago

Yep, sounds like a classic case of an ERP or order management system throwing documents over the wall because "well all the data's there, so the warehouse can figure it out". And as for "who got paid", probably some COBOL programmer who retired decades ago and is now living the dream entirely offline in a beach house in Costa Rica. Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.

perl4ever 6y ago

PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded. I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format. There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it. My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.