Re:Postzegelcode
by inopinatus on Sunday June 30, 2024 @07:52PM
(#40841418)
This isn’t a minor detail. As with stored-value cards vs credit cards, the location of the master record(s) has far-reaching consequences for dependant business processes. Any field activity depending on on-demand access to a centralised API contains the seeds of its own failure.
The availability of centralized API was not the issue. The issue was that the operators were significantly more efficient when performing the process “by eye” than when supported by some kind of computerized system. For example the on-depot sorting process that we settled on was two-phase: first you sort the parcels either manually by routing codes on the labels or through automated sorting line with the current data and then in second phase the operator scans everything that is supposed to go out of the depot and in that process moves around the ~5% of parcels that got sorted incorrectly, which is incredibly more effective than doing that correctly in one pass.
Re:Postzegelcode
by inopinatus on Sunday June 30, 2024 @08:15PM
(#40841505)
> The availability of centralized API was not the issue. The issue was that the operators were significantly more efficient when performing the process “by eye” than when supported by some kind of computerized system.
If you think these are different considerations, then you are splitting the wrong hairs. The process landed on to resolve the conflict is not at all surprising, but doesn’t sound like it addressed the underlying architectural conceit.
At a large enough scale you can do most of these processes by automation, except the actual courier delivery. And well, at least UPS has actual identified locations in their vans, so just going by location+barcode might be somewhat practical for them.
Re:Postzegelcode
by inopinatus on Sunday June 30, 2024 @08:44PM
(#40841631)
Beware of the line of operations research thinking that has latterly tanked Boeing’s engineering reputation, something the rest of us designing layered business processes can all learn from. Complexity is always best handled pushed down to the leaves of the tree. The ideal central body performs reporting and audit, not command and control. Although for some, I suppose the Boeing takeaway might be that the bottom line improved and no-one went to prison.
Also, cool design of the label is one thing, but on both laser and thermal printers the resolution repeatability is much better in the direction perpendicular to the paper travel, so you do not want to do cute design things with vertical barcodes. And you want to have a huge margin below the barcode if it is aligned to the bottom of the label as some printers will occasionally get misaligned and part of the barcode will get on the next label… and the imaging scanners in Zebra terminals will happily read half a milimetre high code-128 barcode instead of the correct one on the bottom of the label.