“The entire factory is stopped waiting for you”.
These are the words that no-one wants to hear. I was a junior software installation engineer visiting a food factory on the South Coast of England. I’d got onsite early to perform an upgrade on the system and everything had gone ok apart from one little thing.
In the early 2000s, connectivity in the VAN (Value Added Network) – the backbone of EDI was typically via a modem, connected to an analogue phone line and relied on an initiation string to tell the modem what to do.
A combination of Windows NT, this particular VAN and the modem itself NEVER worked (as I found out!).
It took a lot of work by the development and support team to get things working and the orders coming in.
What lesson can be learnt here?
Never ignore a plan B (or C!). There will ALWAYS be another way to make something work, even if it is not ideal. Having alternative plans do NOT mean that plan A is compromised or you are gearing yourself up for failure, you are just better prepared for the eventuality of something going wrong.
