By a stroke of luck, I was in the right place at the right time to have an idea like that, and Nortel, to their credit, got behind it hard immediately. After a short period basically idling and researching under the original project manager, I was partnered with two really great human beings, Mike and Jackie. (I’ve regrettably lost touch with Jackie over the years; Mike remains a highly respected friend who has often provided well-considered perspectives on issues I’ve discussed over the years, usually significantly less radical than mine but not as often as you might think if you looked at us on paper. Hi Mike!)
Basically the three of us put the whole thing together. I was in a bit of a silo; my primary responsibility started on the action side of things. So I found the tools and used them to write the programming necessary for the basic inventory functionality to be performed with the several dozen shiny new barcode scanners we had, test it from top to bottom, and hey since you’re testing it anyway you could actually do part of the inventory, etc.
Things went well; people who read my writing or listen to me talk would likely be surprised, but all that verbiage is ultimately in service of getting things down to their core points, getting to their roots. This change saved Nortel at least several hundred thousand dollars almost immediately, and in the long term the savings to them and other client companies of Computer Sciences Corp absolutely must have been, at minimum, in the range of tens of millions of dollars in wasted labor and correcting clerical errors, to say nothing of the additional value-add of a more robust, effective, efficient, and highly scalable asset management system.
Tech sidebar: For those of you keeping track at home, we were using a Palm III mod manufactured by Symbol Technologies. I used a platform called Pendragon Forms to create an app that would collect the data. Mike was instrumental in noting that these things also had wifi capability, which Nortel happened to be experimenting with in their buildings for other purposes at the time, so it became very close to a real-time auditing situation – you could literally scan the barcode, pull down the matching data from the server if it existed, created it if it didn’t, incidents logged, assets managed, data (oh GOD what a mess that data was!) normalized, etc., and do it all in a hundredth or less the time it took to do it the old-fashioned way.
I digress. Pendragon Forms -> MS Access/VBA -> SQL Server -> Oracle and back was the datapath I ended up having to construct and clean up and sort out and shoehorn, and I did it. Worked a lot of 15 hours days doing it, especially when I had to communicate by phone with Scotland or Hong Kong, but I got my part done and between me and my two amazing partners we managed to work a minor miracle and kind of invented a tiny little wheel that has since spun off and is probably still rippling and reverberating as tech advancement enables further refinement of the basic concepts.
Pretty awesome move for a mouthy longhair who didn’t want to crawl around under desks. Heinlein’s “Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail” comes to mind…
