Reply to post: Re: re: Too bad they couldn't continue operating as normal with paper records,

Re: re: Too bad they couldn't continue operating as normal with paper records,

The issue is the level of productivity enabled by IT compared to manual processes is on the order of 10x in many industries.

Reverting to a manual paper process therefore means that staff are at absolute best capable of running at about 10% of normal capacity. Using an unfamiliar process that a good three quarters of the staff need training on probably means they are running about a third to half of the speed that is theoretically attainable, so real world you'd probably actually be down to about 3%-5% of normal productivity.

Even if your in a low impact industry where IT has "only" doubled the productivity of all staff, your still looking at only being able to get one half of the jobs done.

For somewhere like Quack Fit the people looking at your car plug it into a computer, ask the computer what's wrong and then it tells them "replace part X92624510", the part fitters drive the car back into the carpark and get the next one while the admin types get the parts, and then when the parts come in the admin types tell the parts fitters and then they get the car and fit them.

When the computer doesn't work then they actually have to revert to skill and experience to debug the problem. As skilled or experienced staff are more expensive, experienced staff tend to end up working for an independent garage they as a general rule don't have either hugely skilled or experienced staff which means that all of the jobs take very considerably longer.

As their workload is based around not actually figuring out what the problem is, and just relying on the diagnostics being right they are buggered without the computers.

Now, my mechanic wouldn't notice his computer being down. But he wouldn't notice that because he doesn't need it for anything but printing the bill out nicely, and he's quite happy to do that on a sheet with a pen. I've driven up to the door when he's been expecting me before and he's just told me what's wrong with it by the sound the car makes, and 40 odd years experience.

But for some reason people would rather regularly pay parts fitters for perfectly good parts to be replaced than pay a mechanic an hours labour to fix the underlying cause of a problem.