On the seventh (work) day of Christmas my supplier said to me “We just finished that batch. I’ll have to start a new one to make that change.”

On the sixth (work) day of Christmas my supplier said to me ‘Do you really think we need an RMA? You don’t really want to return it, do you?’ 

On the fifth (work) day of Christmas, my supplier said to me ‘Do you really think we need an RMA? It’s just a little scratch, does it really matter that much?’ 

On the 4^th day of Christmas my supplier said to me ‘what is a Supplier Corrective Action Request?… Oh! Why don’t you let us skip the paperwork and just fix it?’ 

On the third day of Christmas my supplier said to me “we’re running behind. COVID has caused delays in our own supply chain.” 

On the second (work) day of Christmas, my supplier said to me “Hmmm… I can’t find your reject notice. Are you sure you sent it? It was an email, right?”

On the first (work) day of Christmas, my supplier said to me: ‘um, well… we don’t really do EDI.’ This, of course, is not the first time you’ve heard this, and it won’t be the last.

Business process workflow is everywhere. Any business that offers a product or service uses business process. Some do it poorly without defining business process, while others do it well with defined and enforced business process workflow. All businesses are process oriented, and without well defined business process no business can be sustainable.

Working from home. It’s every IT staff member’s dream. Who doesn’t want to avoid frustrating commutes, dress codes, and that one coworker that may or may not remind you of Dwight Schrute? It sounds blissful, doesn’t it? For many around the world, working from home, location independence, or utilizing alternative workspace is becoming more realistic and many companies are leading initiatives to push the business environment in that direction.

The family supply chain has suffered a great deal during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Since the beginning of the safer at home orders, grocery store shelves, once completely full, now (at the time of this writing) have empty spaces where items necessary for the health of our families used to be. Even meat disappeared for a week or so here in Middle Tennessee as people began panic buying. Of course, this was a logistics-based problem as food suppliers simply could not send their product out quick enough to meet the demand. Now there is another looming meat shortage, but this time it is a production issue.