TechArchive

This article was originally written in the period 1995-2000

There’s a culture of impatience these days that’s threatening our basic efficiency. What I mean is that there are fundamental attitudes creeping into our lives which are counterproductive. I’ll explain.
We all know about `JIT’, `batch-of-one manufacture’, etc. By making changeovers cheaper, it’s become possible to make almost entirely to order (rather than being forced to make huge batches for stock to keep machine efficiencies up) with shorter leadtimes and lower inventory costs as a result. But it needs to be more reliable (as any one stage failing stops everything) and to respond to the variability of demand and maintain response times, you need excess capacity. So it’s bound to be more expensive per unit than large batch manufacture buffered by warehouse stocking. I’m not suggesting we should step back in time, but those of us who make analogies with manufacturing (long-standing readers may remember I advocated JIT as the philosophy the health service should use for bed allocation, rather than outdated utilisation monitoring) should bear these drawbacks in mind.
This is because not all situations in this day and age are analogous to manufacturing plants. Take the example of, say, electrical parts mail order. One system is to have a telephone line, with instant service, and a promise of an answer within three rings, 99% of the time. Massive staffing is required, many of whom either sit around most of the time, or have another job as well but can never settle down to it. Even so, at peak times, customers end up disappointed by long periods on hold or waiting for the phone to be answered.
Another system might be to have an answerphone, fax number and email address. You send your requirement and how to contact you, and they get back to you with faxed confirmation as soon as they get round to your order. Whether you’re there or not. The service guarantee is 99% of orders acknowledged within an hour. This means they can plan their operator staffing in lumps of at least an hour based on demand, and a sudden rush for ten minutes doesn’t result in anyone’s service suffering.
The bottom line is, the service would be run for their convenience and efficiency, not yours. Which might seem like a bad thing. But then it would be a damn sight cheaper to run, and ultimately, you’re paying for it, because their overheads affect your prices. Also, you’d know where you stood. Two minutes from now, you’ll definitely have sent (placed) your order and you can get on with something else.
This whole example is a different situation from a JIT manufacturing facility, because there is no cost to inventory (a queue of faxes), and so the advantage of the first system is simply customer convenience.
The difference with the other system is that there’s just a bit of buffering in the system so it lets everyone work more efficiently without continual interruption.
Now imagine that instead of an order line we’re talking about you exchanging information with suppliers, customers or colleagues. Insisting on an instant response by phone is disruptive, unrealistic, and may result in you wasting time failing to get hold of them. A better tack is a fax or email detailing what you want to know, when you need to know it by, and your preferred (least disruptive) means of reply. But you’re only likely to do this regularly if you have reason to expect that the desired response may be possible, and if creating the fax or email is quick and easy.
The first of these is what I am getting to, I guess. If organisations declared that they could be contacted by fax or email and guaranteed a response within an hour, folk would be prepared to lay off the phone. An organisation which gives out a tech support email address, but only checks it daily is shooting itself in the foot.
Also, if raising a fax takes 10 minutes, you’ll use the phone. Most companies have not made the creation of documents as streamlined as they might, and this is why email has been such a step forward for many people the creation of a written, filed, “buffered” message is incredibly quick, and you can tell (using a receipt) whether they have received it yet or not. It’s not instantaneous like the phone. But it doesn’t need to be.
The desire for instantaneous contact is going to put a huge strain on our telecommunications bandwidth over the coming years, and yet at night we have quiet cheap off peak phones just waiting to be used for faxing and email exchanges. We really should learn to help each other be more efficient.