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How We Handle Problems?

Infototo adopts the methodology - 'Do right things in right way at right time' in all our services, and this has made a lot of success stories. Here are some of the cases we have handled.  We will name them as A client and so on, this is to protect the confidentiality of our clients.  

Case 1:

System Performance Problem                               

(Industry: Financials)

Our A client had implemented an Enterprise System for 11 months.  During that period, all the end users except one were quite satisfied with the system.  Apparently, he had to wait 6 to 10 seconds to move from one field to next for data entry every time.  As other users also used the same function, they did not encounter such problems so their vendor assumed that the PC was the only possible reason.  The PC was replaced but the problem still existed.  Naturally, the poor user had to work long over-time everyday to settle his daily job. The long-term of extreme over-time had nearly drove him to give up his job.  The management decided to seriously look into this problem and thus we were involved.  We spent a few hours working with the user side by side.  After 3 days’ of investigation and testing, we discovered the root cause, and ironically, the solution was so simple that it took us only two minutes to remove the problem thoroughly. 

Morale:

Pain is pain even if it looks like small. Do right things in right way to relieve pains once and forever!

Case 2:

Incorrect Output with Correct Input

(Industry: Maintenance and Services )

B Client’s General Manager once told us that their top management was wondering if they had made a wrong decision in implementing the Enterprise System as it could not provide the right figures in their management reports.  For example, there were supposed to be $3 million of outstanding sales orders but the system computed it as about $1 million. If the user had inputted the right figure why was the system producing the wrong output to them?  The General Manager appointed us to look into the problem for them.  We checked the design of one of the local reports and did a minor logic change to it, and then conducted a short training to them.  Within 3 hours, all the reports produced correct information.

Morale:

Trust your expectation.  If there’s a gap between your expectation and practice, get the right person to fill up the gap!

Case 3:

Software Bugs                               

(Industry: Manufacturing)

C client complaint their enterprise system always kicked off users during daily operation hours.  They repeatedly faced the problem after logging onto the system as the system claimed it ran out of resources.  The software vendor suggested  to C client to increase the memory capacity.  While the client waited extra budget to be approved, we were hired to look into their system.  We analyzed the time pattern and function usage pattern of the problem occurrence, and successfully allocated the root cause.  It was a minor bug hidden in a common software routine that was usually covered by large memory space.  A simple fix cleared the hassles of the whole company, and saved the unnecessary extra hardware cost.

Morale:

When unreasonableness affects everyone, don’t accept common excuse before investigation is done.  A simple solution may save you everything.

Case 4:

System Upgrade and Data Integrity                           

(Industry: Financials)

D Client decided to upgrade their software systems to new version, as they required the new features urgently.  They found that after the upgrade, they lost all 9000+ of temporary records in the intermediate tables.  Their vendor proposed two options: (a) remain with the old version; (b) clearing the temporary information from the old version, then upgrade the system from there.  But the client insisted their business require them to keep the temporary information for six months as it is very critical to their corporation, and as well as upgrade to new version.  We knew that there was only one solution, i.e. upgrading the system and getting back all the temporary data to the new version although the data structures were entirely different from old version.  Still, we managed it with success and client was happy with the performance of the new version and the integrity of data.

Morale:

Impossible is possible as long as you are committed to making it happen.

Case 5:

Operation and Engineering problems                        

(Industry: Logistic Services)

E Client’s Operation Manager called us to help him resolve an urgent problem one evening.  Their receiving operation had to be stopped, as the warehouse had no rooms for the new received boxes.  We visited on-site and discovered the receiving areas were piled up with all the received boxes.  The cause was that the warehouse had two types of boxes, one was for big and another was for small.  To save space, the big boxes could only be placed in big locations.  For some reasons, a lot of small boxes occupied big locations.  Our client discovered that evening, they received all 10K of big boxes from supplier and there were no big locations for the boxes.  The Operation Manager was thinking to have some 10K small boxes transferred out of big box locations but that would require extra manpower and overtime. In addition, the normal receiving operation and shipping operation had to be delayed.   We believed that there had to be an easier way out. We analyzed the receiving and shipping function and wrote a simple program to test the system out.  We started with allocating about 1K small boxes from big locations to be moved to small locations first.  Once it started, receivers just needed to run our small program for a second every time before allocating locations for a cart of received boxes.  The operators found the method too brilliant to be believed: They just did 1K instead of 10K extra boxes pickup and putaway, the warehouse ran smoothly since then.

Morale:

A brilliant IT solution can save you manpower, time and money when it is applied properly and timely!

Case 6:

Data Recovery                          

(Industry: Logistic Services)

F client encountered a serious system crash. Although their software vendor helped them bring up the system, the lost data couldn’t be recovered. The direct impact was to the billing invoices as the system automatically generated the monthly billing invoices based on the data in the database. Usually there would be around $500K of outstanding billing amount every month, but that month they could only get about $380K just because a lot of data was lost. To give their customer a consistent document and to recover unnecessary loss, they called us to give a try. We analyzed the data source of the invoice and the data flow of the application, then wrote a program to extract some important data from other sources than the database. All in all, we spent 3 days generating a billing invoice based on ground data and the amount was about $495K.

Morale:

Data = Money.  As long as you dare to break usual thinking cycle, there is always a way to minimize loss even if it’s inevitable.

Call us at +65 6766 7061 or email us for more story cases.