Dr. BRIAN CHURCH

Dr  Church was one of the  people who were behind the original decision to move toward an SAPI system and is one of the few directors who makes extensive use of IT.

I’m responsible among other things for inventory levels in the company , setting inventory budget,for achievement inventory budget, for monitoring all aspects of inventory. So the main things I use it for  are foe inventory management-to  understand what inventory we have , where we have it. I tend not to use the system itself directly. Most of the reports have too much information. There are one or two that I use. They’re never in the formati want so what  I usaually do is to run in a query. Which I write my self,extracts the information  I want. The msjority of those reports don’t print they write to other files  which I tend to download to my PC. I have a macro set up there in spreadsheet so that each month  I could run macro files and print it whenever I want,  in the format ,order I want. It takes 3 ½  hours to produce the report instead it takes me 40 minutes. The main area where I’m benifitting is that I can get the information  I want. Previously  there wasn’t one  set of numbers. If you wanted to know what I tem there was in stock you could go into the old database, its probably only about 70% accurate. So  there’s one set of numbers, I can go into it, I can extract whatever data I want. Yes , I think the key is that the company is now running on one set of numbers. Previously the accounts people had their set of numbers which they regarded as right but anybody else were wrong.

I’ m beginning  to think that a part of our implementation was probably done incorrectly. What we did  was we took the way  we used to plan manully and computerized it.  My feeling is that, at the grass root level, not at the senior level  that production peolple are not signed on to what we were doing. Because of that it isn’t working on that area, and that’s causing problems at the interface with other departments.

The main problem I think is at the supervisor and manager level. Everybody told us that whatever  training  you do you won’t  do enough. Because of that if they get a transaction wrong, they don’t understand that it’s going to come back and cause them a problem later.

I only took MIS over this year so I can’t say what happened before. Most of the MIS people we have are programmers, if you like it’s like comparing a process engineer with the maintenance engineer, they like building things they don’t like painting them after they’re built.

Their attitudes is we can write something that’s give you extractly what you want across the board. It migth take them 5-10 years – 8 people  can’t write a system like that with any sensible time. I’ve had several discussion with them.  What don’t see is that  the guy now has the ability to look into the warehouse and write off stock in the warehouse as well. Maybe I wasn’t in close enough or maybe I didn’t apply enough control to stop  a bit of a Frankenstein being born. We need to get  MIS under control . that’s another problem I have.