MBA Hackers

I run the quality assurance/control department of a large fresh produce distributor. The majority of my warehouse staff's day is spent running inventory reports and checking product quality in the warehouse. Our ERP system has only very primitive QC/QA support so our daily routine was a frustratingly slow paper based process. Further, the system leaves absolutly no records by which one could measure productivity or success. During those dark times we had to just guess what needed to be done next because we didn't know what was already completed, or what was left to be done. So much slipped through the cracks... The percentage of product returned or rejected by customers was embarrassing.

I don't remember where I picked this idea up, but I truly believe that management is an engineering job. I was trying to engineer a high preformance process without any real data on how accurate our staff was, how quickly tasks were preformed... We honestly knew nothing about what we had going on at any give time. It was clear that nothing was going to improve unless we figured out how to assign and track our tasks, so I spent some time walking the process and created a list of what I needed from our ERP to effectively manage the QC operation. I forwarded the list to our ERP Vendor and asked for an estimate. The estimate was staggeringly high and implementation would take months.

Instead I built it myself. It took half a day to come up with a 70% solution, learning php and sql as I went. The system I came up with was a hacked together hodgepodge of php, sql, and a tiny bit of python running on a ubuntu LAMP server. Basically, I built an internal web-based quality control task system. I works like a big shared todo list, where the system divides the work, assigns each employee one task at a time, gives the employee the information they need to do the task, and records the information gathered by the employee.

I bought my staff android tablets for about $200 each and sent them into the warehouse. Productivity skyrocketed. I don't know exactly how much was being done prior to implementing the system, but we know it couldn't have been more than 50 quality checks a day per employee. Now we are pushing 300. Almost 6x improvement is insanely great. Importantly, my team also loves the system. They have to do so much less walking around and searching for product because the location is right on the screen. They don't have to go searching for a category managers when they find poor quality products, now they just tap a button and an email is sent for them. It doesn't hurt that they now have a clear grasp of what is expected of them.

</sidenote)Oddly in my favor; Resistive touchscreen tablets are much cheaper, and in a 33 - 45 degree warehouse my staff preferred to leave their gloves on and use a stylus. The iPad I tested first sits in a office drawer.</sidenote>.

I spent an hour here and there over the first few days cleaning up the code and by the end of the week I had a system that tracks everything the department does and completely eliminated all the process bottle necks I could identify. I even added a few javascript touches to reduce the amount of typing. Its not in anyway well coded... What's MVC? But it is stable and works very well. I haven't made any updates to the system in months, so it just sits in the corner quietly improving my life, and the company's bottom line.

TLDR: hacked up a task/todo system. saved a lot of money. made my staff, and boss very happy.

I also find it to be very rare among my colleagues. In fact, I haven't met anyone else in the same positions I have held in any of the industries that I've been in that can or do code.

I'm biased but I think that heavily specialized professionals are not what is needed right now. I've heavily focussed on Marketing/Sales/Tech and skills from each discipline have aided me many times. I can't imagine how much more difficult it would be if I were only focused on marketing, or only sales, or only programming. Want to talk about product differentiation or potential markets? Let's do it. Want to go to see a potential customer? Awesome, fill me in on who they are and what their problems are. Want to talk about how bad my code is? Excellent, help me make it better (HNers make me feel like a script-kiddie).

Master of none? Possibly. Get shit done? Definitely. I hope we start to see more people going cross-discipline and using the skills they've learned in their careers and not abandoning the skillets as it's not 'normal'. Specialized individuals seem to me like it fits better with a large organization culture and the world seems to be moving away from that now (I'm definitely heavily biased here so my thoughts could be far from reality).

To answer the question of what do I do to make myself more productive - I actually usually focus on entire systems that drive me nuts rather than small optimizations for my own benefit (Much to the dismay of my colleagues as I don't care for finding keyboard shortcuts - they constantly laugh at me for not knowing that command+alt+shift+F3+F5 will open a new tab with the contents from the last page I had opened). The most recent example is a Rails app I built to track documents (Stored on S3) associated with machines in production (Things like build orders, quotes, shipping docs, etc.) because it was driving me crazy that a dozen people wasted a couple hours every day calling around to find the right documents. Now they just go to the site and I haven't heard a request since. It takes them moments. They want to expand it into other things now like tracking details of service calls handled by our reps around the world. With Rails in my tool belt it's very easy for me to get something up quickly that can be used at a fraction of the cost that it would for an external system. Coding it properly and keeping it simple also makes it scalable. In the long run it will probably die like all other software but the cost of implementing it now (in both terms of my time and company dollars) weighed against the benefits it delivers makes it a no-brainer.

I would also recommend Hazel, which will automatically do some folder cleanup/maintenance for you based on a series of rules you setup.

Finally I use TextExpander religiously to never have to type the same email again.