Organizational Data and Management Assumptions-102

I was hired by an international manufacturer (>$15 billion in yearly sales) to examine computer data and its Oracle data warehouse. It seemed that the company and its many manufacturing plants was adopting SAP for its accounting system. During the long switchover to the new system, Oracle programmers would receive sales figures at the end of every sales month (at midnight). The data would then be massaged into the data warehouse so it would be available to manufacturing managers worldwide. Of course, the accountants would continue to keep their books. The problem was those books were not identical to the data warehouse totals. The data warehouse was always less.

I examined the data downloading procedure, the program (PL-SQL) which pulled the data from each manufacturing facility into the data warehouse. During this 3 month period, all the people who had been operating this system inaccurately were terminated – so I was the entire department. I was told not to bother the plant managers because they had too much work to do. – but I found nothing wrong.

Finally, I asked one of the manufacturing VPs who the smartest, most experienced plant manager was. I was referred to a female plant manager overseas. I called her and asked her when the end of the business month was. She responded: “at midnight on the last working day of each month.”

Since that was when the data was downloaded, I had no clue what I was doing wrong - so I asked “and when do you close the books for each month?”

She responded “on the fifth working day after the day previously mentioned.”

What a bombshell!!!

So, when the programmer asked the questions to write the Oracle program, he misunderstood what he was told.

At midnight of the last business day of the month, no more sales were made –

But bookkeeping additions continued for five more days. That is why the monthly download was always less than the accounting department totals!

I would have found all this out if I had been permitted to re-engineer the software requirements from scratch. Incorrect programmer assumptions caused much turmoil in the management ranks.