Rodent Regatta

I’ve used computers all my life – well, beginning in college, but that was long, long ago. I’ve never built one – a college or a computer.

Gary Petersen is building a new PC and provides some information about where to get certain things. He also links to some AMD resources for those interested in the real nitty-gritty of installing things like processor chips and heat sinks and such.

What caught my eye was Gary’s discussion of just how the order cycle went with each supplier. I live in the town where FedEx was founded and is headquartered. They coined the phrase, the information is as important as the shipment, or something very similar to it.

I’m fascinated by how businesses do and don’t go about designing processes that insure they can meet their claims. What has to go on behind the scenes of a business to make certain they have what they say they have, they can ship it when they say they can ship it and they can provide information about where your order stands when you need it? Those things seem so trivial, but those that can pull this off to ”five nines” of reliability are few and far between.

Were I to dedicate the rest of my working life to an endeavor, it would be to help people and businesses remove hassle from their work processes and build excellence and dependability into them. As W. Edwards Deming often asked, ”By what method?” Too few can really answer that question.