I recently worked for a very large and well known company, to migrate their legacy procurement systems to cloud. To help you, my reader, to clearly understand legacy- when I requested the user manuals for these systems, I got PDF scans of cyclostyles! Long story short.. Really old systems which were continued to be used because.. they worked..
They had an unbelievable number of such home-grown systems (Care to guess how many? No matter what you guess, you might be wrong!). I was assigned a bunch of systems – large and small – related to procurement and I was asked to study them and help move their functionality to the cloud platform.
One of these systems is what the story is about. On the face of it, it was a simple tools issue system, and it was considered a pretty straight forward candidate for migration. When I dug deep, I understood that the system was not fussy about what tools it was giving out. However, it was extremely fussy about who it issues tools to, and outright obsessed about whether they return the tool or at least account for it. That made me wonder why..
These tools were not expensive in any way.. They were consumables at best. So why was the system so particular? In context, the tools were used to service extremely high value transportation products (You can figure out what they are from my profile.. Just can’t say the name here). So, why the system was doing what it was doing? Two reasons:
To ensure that certain critical tools were issued to only qualified personnel and
To ensure that no tools were accidentally left behind in those insanely expensive transportation products
That changes the whole narrative does it not? This system was not a material management system but rather a health and safety system. Had it been ruthlessly moved to a cloud based generic procurement system, that particular safety check would have been lost.
Morals of the story: When working with systems,
Always consider the context
Do not assume. Study in detail
While specialization in any technology has its pluses, keep a little room for generalists
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