As it is the early start of 2019 my mind wondered in what is next. As a reflex I wondered also on what has been. When doing that I thought back on the very start of my working career which was in September 2000 and I was reflecting on what was actually different then.
When reflecting on that I can see big changes or things that really have not changed at all and I will let you decide on how the overall change is. In 2000 my first work was to be a supply chain planner at a large company operating worldwide. I remember my first period very well and I can give a short description of that first period.
I had a desktop computer and mine was the only one in the department that actually had Internet enabled and the only reason was that I had to be able the trace DHL shipments as we were quite often out of local stock and we had to provide supply through express shipment. I did not have a mobile phone from business I was working for but only had my own which was not in any way used during working hours. We were still using Fax to send orders and confirmations to suppliers and customers and this was normal practice. The reality was that we had much less around the work and as such were not really distracted by social media or anything else. The largest customers were in regular phone or email contact with our dedicated customer service department and they were relaying the customer wishes to us planners almost realtime.
We had some different systems we worked in and when we had to do some improvements or analysis we downloaded information to excel and provided analysis through this way. The different systems were not that modern and as such were limited in the reporting functionality and actually only used for the transaction mostly. But we as a young team already in 2001 started to experiment with loading the data over night of the different systems into a dedicated database and over the next years we managed to add most systems in that database and I was one of the planners that then used MS Access and ODBC connections to create custom reports that were always refreshed with over night data. I guess you could call it an early data lake or pond.
We started working with customers and suppliers on electronic feeds to our transaction systems and we were able to implement this for our largest partners in the early 2000s. We called it interfaces and we had usually a month of stabilisation before those interfaces were really working well. In our warehouse we had RF scanners so that the operators made very little mistakes and ran a pretty efficient organisation.
Information was stored on FileShares and these FileShares were department based or community based and as such protected with different rights. Email and phone were the communication method and I was taught that phone was better when urgent and email was to be used for non urgent and sharing larger pieces of information. Conference calls were only used limited and I as planner had maybe 2 in a whole a month and if I had to organise a conference call I had to loan the telco bridge from one of the European managers as this was not something we had locally.
As I was reflecting on the early 2000s and relate it back to what I see around me I can see many things that have changed but the core of the work and challenges remained the same in my opinion. Yes the tools for collaboration and communication have changed and improved drastically and with social media and apps on smart phones we are able to offer much more services to customers but in some cases I think it also took our eye of the ball and with more distractions people are also exposed to more information and potentially stress than it was back then. So in my opinion these new technologies are great but they won’t do anything if we are not joining them right here in 2019!
