AI – At long last the Government wakes up!

[The VFM Addict]

Ed P wrote:

@VFM — pilferage is one of the major problems that stuffs up a fully integrated sales/reordering system. Although it is possible to think of ways of using technology such as RFID to monitoring stock being moved around it is probably more cost effective just to do inventory spot checks on the goods that are found to break or ‘walk’ the most, and link shortages with the reordering process. As Lidl only pay bare minimum wages using staff spare time is probably the cost effective route.

I agree but why would that not be the same across all spermarkets.  So why is it that Lidl and Aldi alone do manual ordering?   As for spare time you must have better eyesight than me.  Finding an assistant with ‘spare time’ in those stores is pretty much impossible.   By chance I knew a Lidl branch manager for a short while.   They are on bonuses for reducing staff.   Indeed more so than for increasing branch sales.   That’s why the queues are so long at the checkouts.   Better to have a few customers give up and leave the store rather than have an extra member of staff on check-outs.   Crazy to my mind.   Perhaps that’s why Aldi despite having less stores are outperforming Lidl.

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[Richard]

JayCeeDee wrote:

‘Chopped’

The Marsden issued a booklet to me called “Eating well when you have cancer”. There’s a pdf on the Marsden website. LINK. I found it areally useful reference. Plain advice, no preaching. Hope you find it useful. PS – as you’ll read in the book, you’re not drinking enough water. One consultant told me that more water will help dilute the toxins in the body – I asked him wouldn’t it dilute the treatment also – he didn’t have an answer for me!! However, I’ve been told on several occassions, by several health professionals, that I should drink more water – I still find it a struggle.

If you are having tablets for the treatment the last thing that you want is for them to sit in your stomach so water can be important to stop that from happening. However, most appear to be delivered as infusions that are then fetched out by the kidneys and dumped into the bladder where they or their metabolites may not be what either the kidneys or the bladder most desire so, according to my wife’s oncologist they are best flushed away ASAP as they have done their work by the time they end up in kidneys or bladder. He advocated rather more water than my wife still drinks though probably less than I take on board on a usual day. I am surprised that your person was less than ready with a usable answer as it appears fairly straight forward to me. In fact with some of the infusions they also packaged in a litre of saline drip to keep things moving as there was a risk of tissue damage. They had to be intravenous as the blood flow helped to cushion their impact on the body, if they missed the vein and made contact with nerves or other tissues, the consequences could be dire.

For me a poor day sees about 2~3 litres, but more usually 3~5 litres, which I know is pushing it a bit. Increasing that, should the need ever arise, just might be an issue for me. So far I am just about reaching about 2 litres today, but more to come I am sure.

[Richard]

Dave Rice wrote:

Automation has been replacing many IT jobs for years. I could upgrade 25,000 Office installs in a managed way inside a week all by myself (same goes for MS updates etc.). It would usually take 2 of us to mop up the failures, in the case of spectacular problems – usually Adobe related – we’d have a task force of 6 – 10 but the need for any physical hands on a box was very rare. It took only 2 of us to manage the AV for the same number of seats and that was mainly because you’d need cover for absence. When I first started it was all hands on. I remember spending all day in Truro installing W95 and Office on 2 PCs via a box of floppies. But then the number of PCs in the organisation was probably measured in (many) hundreds not tens of thousands. Especially when you had to write a fully costed business case to get one!

Back in the mid 1980s I was looking at automated data entry. One task took 4 person weeks to build a 2000 customer record system. Then about 3:00 p.m. I got a call asking if I could do something about  a number of thousands of records that needed to come from one sick setup to a new relief machine ASAP. Including developing and testing I had the first 2000 records live by 21:00 hours that night. With further development work I could load 2000 records synchronised with the stand alone billing records in 2 hours. I guess my development time was less than one week. The error rate fell from about 1% to a decimal with zeros over 25,000 customers. The mind numbing labour reduction was something like 1 person year. There is still a huge potential for such savings in eye-strain and human time wasting.

[Ed P]

Do they actually do manual ordering, or do they use POS and augment with spot checks?  Obviously I do not know, but  this link implies that they are rolling out a European SAP integrated system, and that staff are probably spot checking and going in with a ‘clean’ stores inventory number.

Its hard to know exactly where the UK is within Lidl’s overall strategy, my guess is that they are currently on a semi-manual system. If they started their SAP roll-out two years ago they are probably in the middle of their UK implementation right at this moment.

Whatever they do has to be be a lot better than Waitrose which has a near third-world inventory management system! (supposedly integrated but their central warehouses have a totally screwed up picking system, as empty shelves are a common sight)

[JayCeeDee]

3 – 5 litres of water a day meets my definition of perpetual motion – I’d be standing in the bathroom with a glass in one hand and something else in the other!!!

 

Regarding missing the vein, on one of my treatments I mentioned a slight burning sensation as the treatment started and a whole series of events started. They stopped the infusion, photographed the cannula in situ, flushed it with saline iirc, took me to one of the day beds away from the chairs, and I spent the rest of the afternoon monitored, checked and obs taken. It felt like the only thing missing was the klaxon!! More photos were taken during the aftrenoon of the injection site and the ensuing red patch. The conclusion was the cannula had gone into the vein and just out of the other side, wrong angle of approach.

What I like about the Marsden is they use a problem as a learning exercise.

[Richard]

Ed P wrote:

“They simply were not allowed to order spares and certainly no growth ‘spares’ without a long convoluted process to gain authority.” I think you put the finger on one of the major problems that the Civil Service and many other Government organisations face. Throwing systems at a carp manual process is simply a waste of money and adding bureaucratic overhead and reporting rarely improves control . The now almost disused Organization & Methods procedures need to be dusted off and the whole manual process streamlined well before any code is written!

Yes EdP I read over 40 years back, what most business do not need is a computer system, they need a business system.

If any supermarket is still messing about with hand held data checking stock monitors for anything other than stock checks they deserve to fail and do so soon. Neither of the chains are easy to access from home,. The descriptions, (from others) create no desire to try them. I did visit one or the other while on holiday, possibly about 15 years back. Apart from a load of unfamiliar products they were ‘sort of OK’ though hardly customer focussed with a rough and ready slow till. They were conveniently close to where we stayed, but that was all that could be said for them.

[Bob Williams]

JayCeeDee, thank you! only just checked this Thread, going to read that PDF.

” The Marsden issued a booklet to me called “Eating well when you have cancer”. There’s a PDF on the Marsden website. LINK.

I found it a really useful reference. Plain advice, no preaching. Hope you find it useful.

PS – as you’ll read in the book, you’re not drinking enough water. One consultant told me that more water will help dilute the toxins in the body – I asked him wouldn’t it dilute the treatment also – he didn’t have an answer for me!! However, I’ve been told on several occasions, by several health professionals,  that I should drink more water – I still find it a struggle. ”

Me too! My enlarged prostate only gets me up twice a night now, things have improved from 4-5 times. However, it seems like 10 or 15 minutes before the stream actually stops. Reminds me of my last week at Castle Hill after the Op: I had to keep asking for at least 2 bottles until I could get up and go on my own, praying for the Dreaded Dribbles to wait until I got to the Loo!

But I do drink a lot of water and I am finding that using Spring water is helping me. Just been food shopping this am and bought 4x 1.5L bottles, probably need more in a couple of days. I have a glass in front of me here as I type, keep drinking a drop and filling it up. My liquid waste is now a much better colour, meaning almost transparent, which must mean something.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Ed P]

If you are drinking more than 2.5 litres/day it might be good to check whether you should be drinking an isotonic solution. (about a quarter of a teaspoon of salt per glass (0.9grms/lire)).

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