La technologie d'information

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IT lesson was very interesting today. We did a simulation of a company which improves from its manual order-processing system to IT-aided system and competed among our tutorialmates.

We were split into three companies, each company having one order processing team, an IT design team and several quality checkers. The company sells bike-related products and we had to process all their order forms by determine the total cost, identify out-of-stock items and calculate shipping cost as well. Each company was given a darn thick pile of customers order forms and a catalogue with 1000+products, an out-of-stock list and a shipping cost list. The goal of each company is to improve the speed and quality of the existing manual order processing sytem using IT solution. Every 10minutes we will be updated of how many order forms have been processed by other teams and our team and the simulation lasted for an hour.

At first, it's all manual work. I was in the order processing team doing the eyes-straining activity looking through the looooong catalogue for the item, find the cost, write the cost, then next item, check whether it's out-of-stock anot, check postal code, check shipping cost, total-up customer's cost. Our strategy was to process those forms with fewer (2 or 3) items since an IT solution will come later to help to process those longer forms. and it was a correct strategy and we were ahead of the other two teams by the end of 30minutes. with about 40+orders forms gap. While we were doing the processing job, IT team was working to come up with an IT system to help us process those forms.

Then after that, our IT system was finalised and implemented. Cost finding and calculation is all done on a spreadsheet. Faster fingers first time! Fingers were actually running through the numberpad like crazie. But human errors came in. We have more rejected forms from the QCs coz of typo and one opponent team managed to catch up with more form processed than us. In the end the winning team processed all the 300 forms correctly and our team: 276.and the last team with less than 100. (found out during debrieft that they were having company bonding time instead of doing the work haaha) woohoo.

Debrief. Lesson learnt: Communication is very important for IT team to implement their stuff! Must understand what the end-users want and it's always useful to do it yourself to know the problem better, thus a better solution. The end of simulation was followed by SQL (Structured Query Language) lecture, which happened to be as interesting as well (: