Good systems record. Experience notices. | Observations from the Shop Floor
Michael Gardner, COO
Long before business software put an order on a screen, we put it on paper.
At the millwork company where I spent much of the early part of my career, orders were written on multipart forms. The original served as part of our operational check-and-balance system. It stayed behind and eventually helped us make certain an order had completed its journey through the business. If something became “long in the tooth,” as we used to say, that paper trail helped make sure it didn’t quietly disappear.
There was another copy we called the pencil copy, and recently I have found myself thinking about what happened to those.
Our Vice President, Marvin Burger, had a daily ritual. He would sit in his office with the pencil copies of the orders and go through them one by one. I can still picture him with one of those rubber finger cots on his finger, working his way through the stack. When he finished, those copies were sorted into the salespeople’s mail slots and mailed to us the following day.
I once asked Marvin why he spent the time looking through every order. His answer, as I remember it, was that he was looking for the odd order — the one that could knock things out of balance.
But I believe he was looking for more than that.
By going through those orders every day, Marvin developed a feel for the rhythm of the business. He knew which customers were ordering regularly and what their normal activity looked like. He could sense whether a customer’s business with us appeared to be growing, holding steady or perhaps beginning to slow down.
Every once in a while, one of those pencil copies would arrive in my mail slot with a handwritten note from Marvin. The “attaboys” were nice, of course, but those aren’t the notes I remember most.
I remember the questions.
Why the credit? What’s going on with this mix?
Something about an order had caught his attention, and he wanted me to think about it too.
There were even times when I wrote an order and knew there was something unusual about it. I would think to myself that this one ought to get Marvin’s attention. When the pencil copy came back with the question I expected, there was an odd kind of affirmation in that. I had noticed something different, and so had he.
At the time, though, I don’t think I fully understood what Marvin was doing.
I was a report person. As technology became more available to us, I naturally looked for ways to get information from reports. Later, when I became Sales Manager, I struggled to take on the kind of review responsibility Marvin had practiced so naturally.
Part of that probably came from having been a salesperson myself. My thinking was fairly straightforward: salespeople knew what they were being paid to do. They knew their customers. They knew they were expected to sell. I wasn’t convinced I needed to look over their shoulders to make that happen.
Marvin had come from operations, and today, with quite a few more years behind me than I had then, I think I understand that difference much better.
I don’t believe Marvin was going through those orders simply to make sure the salespeople were doing their jobs. He was watching the business.
An order wasn’t just a sale. It was something that was about to move through the rest of the company. An unusual product mix could mean something. A credit could mean something. A large order could mean something. A customer whose orders suddenly felt different could mean something.
Experience gave Marvin context that wasn’t printed anywhere on the pencil copy.
Unfortunately, I can’t ask him today exactly what he was thinking as he went through those orders. Marvin passed away suddenly, and his passing eventually launched me into a leadership role at Goshen that I had never expected to occupy. So, I don’t want to look back all these years later and put words in his mouth.
What I can do is recognize something I didn’t fully appreciate then.
Marvin had created a daily opportunity to find the exceptions while also keeping his hand on the patterns and rhythm of the business. At the same time, those little handwritten notes created a connection with the people generating the sales. As a salesperson, I knew management was interested enough in what I was doing to actually look at the orders I was bringing in.
There was a surprising amount of intelligence wrapped up in that simple paper process.
We Digitized the Transaction
Over the decades, business software became extraordinarily good at replacing those pieces of paper.
We captured the customer, salesperson, item, quantity, price, cost, credit, promised date, purchase order, receipt, shipment and invoice. We built databases around all of it, followed by reports, inquiries and dashboards that allowed us to retrieve and analyze those transactions faster than Marvin ever could have imagined while sitting there with his stack of pencil copies.
All of that was progress, and all of it remains important.
Looking back, though, I wonder whether we concentrated so much on digitizing the transaction that we overlooked some of what was happening around it.
The pencil copy contained the transaction. Marvin supplied the context.
His experience allowed him to recognize something that didn’t fit the normal pattern, and that recognition caused him to ask a question. That is different from retrieving an order from a database.
For most of the history of business software, we have been very good at answering questions we already know how to ask. Show me today’s orders. Show me open purchase orders. Show me sales by customer. Show me credits above a certain amount. Show me orders below a particular margin.
Those are important questions, and good systems should answer them.
But Marvin wasn’t always looking for something that could have been defined before he started going through the stack. Sometimes he was looking for the order he didn’t know he needed to find.
The Question We Didn’t Know to Ask
That distinction has become increasingly important to me as we begin thinking about what artificial intelligence can actually contribute to business software.
I don’t believe the opportunity is simply to put an AI interface in front of an ERP system so someone can ask for the same information using different words. The more interesting opportunity is whether technology can begin helping us recognize when something deserves our attention.
Can a system understand enough about the normal rhythm of a customer to notice when that rhythm changes? Can it recognize that an order isn’t necessarily wrong, but that something about its mix, pricing, credit, timing or history makes it unusual? Can it bring together what is happening now with what has happened before and suggest that there may be something here worth understanding?
And perhaps just as importantly, can it learn from what happens next?
Marvin didn’t necessarily have the answer when he wrote a question on my pencil copy. Sometimes he was asking me for the context. His experience caused him to recognize the exception, his question caused me to think about it, and my answer added something he didn’t know. The next time something similar happened, both of us knew a little more.
I see that differently today than I did as a thirty-something Sales Manager.
The goal isn’t to replace experience with technology. The opportunity is to use technology to preserve, extend and continually add to the kind of operational awareness that experienced people develop over years of paying attention.
Final Observation
For decades, business software has become remarkably good at recording what happened. The people running businesses have always needed something more.
They need to understand what normal looks like well enough to recognize when something isn’t normal, understand why the difference might matter and decide whether anything needs to be done about it. Sometimes that begins with an answer, but very often it begins with a question.
Looking back, Marvin’s daily ritual wasn’t sophisticated technology. It was a stack of pencil copies, a pencil and a finger cot. But the intelligence wasn’t in the paper. It was in the experience he brought to it, the patterns he recognized, the exceptions that caught his attention and the questions he sent back to the people around him.
It took me a lot of years to fully appreciate what I was watching.
As we think about the next generation of business software, perhaps our challenge isn’t simply to give people faster access to more transactions.
Perhaps it is to help them notice the one transaction in the stack that Marvin would have stopped on.