A customer's delivery address was entered in March with one wrong character in the postcode. Creating that record took nine minutes. Correcting it took six weeks, involved four departments, and in the meantime three more deliveries went to a street a mile from where they should have gone.
The reason is not that anyone was slow. That address existed in the order system, in the customer record, on the carrier's platform, in the invoicing system, in a routing file the warehouse keeps for its own planning, and on a run of labels and documents already issued. Editing the place we call the master corrected nothing that had already been created from it, and there was no path by which a correction travelled outward, because nobody had ever built one. Our systems were designed around the assumption that data arrives correct.
Ownership made it worse. Customer services could amend the customer record but not the order. Logistics administered the carrier platform. The invoices that had already gone needed credit notes from finance, and finance quite reasonably wanted to know who had authorised the change before issuing them. Four queues, none of which held the whole job, and no single person able to say it was done.
What we found in the warehouse was the part I keep thinking about. The supervisor kept a handwritten sheet taped inside a cupboard door, headed with the addresses that are wrong in the system, sixty odd entries long, some of them years old. It was more accurate than anything we ran, it was invisible to every report we produced, and it existed because the people doing the work had given up waiting for us.
For the dozen facts that matter most we defined one place to amend and a route by which the amendment reaches everything downstream, with the copies we control pulling rather than holding their own. A correction is now a ticket type with an owner and a two day target, and where documents have already been issued the reissue is part of the same job rather than a separate argument. The median correction is two days. The sheet in the cupboard came down in August.
We built the front door of every record with real care and left putting one right to goodwill and a biro.
– Serguey Shinder
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