This year marks the 35th anniversary of my first job in enterprise software. What was meant to be a sabbatical from engineering schools became my career. When I look back over this period, there have been amazing advances in hardware and networks. Price performance\u00a0on memory, microprocessors, storage, and communications\u00a0has gone from\u00a0extremely costly to almost for free.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most notable control on my first computer acquaintance was a big red button with the text \u201cEmergency Pull\u201d with a post-it note saying \u201cDon\u2019t touch\u201d. The computer, IBM System\/3 with 16 K memory and 12 MB storage, was 2 meter\u00a0high and 6 meter long. Originally it was designed for\u00a0processing punch cards, but in 1976 diskettes and \u201cgreen screens\u201d were taking over. Yet,\u00a0a\u00a0significant hurdle was still to program around all capacity limitations and that were to be the case for a long time to come.<\/p>\n
Movex, the company where I started my career, was an IBM hang-around, helping companies making the most out of their hardware investment. Our specialty was to digitalize paper-based facilities for inventory\u00a0records (Cardex) and printing\u00a0work order documents (Ormig). Once there it was natural to advance into planning and execution. So we soon became a provider of\u00a0Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems.<\/p>\n
My first assignment as a project leader for implementing MRP was with Anderstorp Werkstads AB (stainless steel smooth band manufacturer with 300 employees) in October 1977. It was exciting to have such a role at the age of 19. But it was also very demanding, such as when the customer\u2019s project manager wrote me a letter with two questions:\u00a01) what\u2019s the purpose of MRP? And 2) how does it work? \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u00a0did our best\u00a0to learn from Joseph Orlicky\u2019s famous MRP\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0and it helped\u00a0although our lack of experience, also from application development,\u00a0made it a tough job. In the end, the project\u00a0became a success and helped us getting closer to fulfill the MRP capability\u00a0as well as preparing\u00a0us for MRP II and then ERP compliance.<\/p>\n In April next year it\u00a0has past\u00a022 years since Lee Wylie at Gartner introduced the ERP term and concept. Lee\u2019s specification well describes the architecture of some of today\u2019s most popular ERP systems. 22 years ago, client\/server ERP was state of the art. Today\u2019s ideal is something very different. In other words, today<\/em> is a typical (high tech) situation: what used to be the best way forward… becomes the opposite. And yes; we have a word for it: Progress<\/em>.<\/p>\n Progress is the primary focus of this blog.\u00a0 First and foremost,\u00a0I intend for Peter\u2019s Blog to be a place where we share ideas and lessons learned to accelerate supply chain performance.\u00a0I hope you will enjoy and participate!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This year marks the 35th anniversary of my first job in enterprise software. What was meant to be a sabbatical from engineering schools became my career. When I look back over this period, there have been amazing advances in hardware … Continue reading