Notes

Preface

1. K. Shaw (2011).

Acknowledgments

1. Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons (2011).

Chapter 1

1. Training staff how to use more advanced spreadsheet, database, e-mail, and graphics functions should be an integral part of an SMB manager’s responsibility. Teaching business students revealed to the author that many of them had not extended their spreadsheet knowledge beyond using such software for row and column accounting tabulations and simple graphs. Their knowledge of the data analysis functions available typically was limited. As a result, it was more difficult to teach them about the uses of a spreadsheet program for decision support applications discussed in chapter 5.

2. The history of Bell Labs by Gertner (2012) is worth a read for those interested in reading more about the history of information technology and other technological advances that helped create the businesses and associated technology we take for granted today. Chapter 7 regarding the contributions of Claude Shannon is particularly appropriate.

3. Felt (1916).

4. Hollerith (1899).

5. One of its many claims to fame is that UNIVAC was used by CBS News to predict the outcome of the presidential election in 1952. However, its correct prediction was not used at first by CBS because their staff doubted it. See Colburn (2012).

6. These two papers were republished in 1949 with an introduction by Warren Weaver as a small paperback book by the University of Illinois Press. This book was reprinted again in 1998 because of the continuing interest in this work.

7. The need for faster transfer of information was illustrated at the beginning of World War II when the tedious manual decoding of Japan’s declaration of war on the United States delayed its submission to the US government until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. No one knows if its more timely submission before the attack would have muted the angry public response and given the US military some time to prepare to reduce the damage.

8. The author’s experience with such systems began as the evening operator of a Burroughs Datatron programmed with punched paper tape at Purdue University in 1960 and programming his doctoral research work in FORTRAN IV for a CDC-6400 computer fed with punched cards in 1971.

9. Robat (2012) provides a brief history of software language development. For a more detailed history related to the development of business decision support software, readers are referred to chapter 1 of the book by Power (2013).

10. These differences were often overlooked in the beginning and could cause considerable frustration when one component of a system was upgraded to a newer version that operated much faster. The author programmed a data acquisition system in the late 1960s that had been operating consistently until a new computer with a graphics display replaced an older computer as the system’s controller. The variance in output data increased significantly and the system began rejecting more products, yet nothing in manufacturing had been changed to the author’s knowledge other than the installation of the new computer. Investigation finally revealed that the cause was the new computer commanding a test module to make a measurement and moving on to the next command to read the measurement result before the test module was able to complete the measurement. The problem was fixed by inserting a BASIC wait command for a few milliseconds delay before sending each read measurement command to allow the test module to complete its operation. The older computer had been slow enough processing commands that these specified delays in the program had not been necessary previously.

11. The old science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s often displayed banks of these devices to convey the image of advanced technology. The author was working in the 1960s as part of the engineering team for such tape drives and parts of that technology was later adapted for use in cinema film projectors and other devices using tape media.

12. Christensen (1997). Chapter 1 describes the development of magnetic disk drives for computer storage. The advancements were so rapid that many of the disk drive manufacturers did not survive the transition to the next advance in this technology. Just contrast the five-megabyte storage capacity of IBM’s first drive unit in the mid-1950s that was the size of a small refrigerator with today’s terabyte storage units that are the size of a small book.

13. In the mid-1970s, the author managed a team developing a 4K memory chip for a major semiconductor manufacturer. As we dealt with the technical challenges, none of us then would have believed that it would be possible to fabricate the gigabyte plus memory chips available in personal computers and flash drives today.

14. While row-and-column tabulations were available on timesharing mainframes, the level of interactivity to allow individual users to do what-if analysis on their terminals was limited.

15. As more and more routine business activities were made possible on a personal-sized computer, the number of computer terminals and typewriters used by a company began to decline.

16. The author was an editor for technical publications in a corporate marketing department in the early 1980s when a survey was conducted to assess what preferences potential business customers had regarding buying a personal computer. This outside survey listed IBM as one of the potential suppliers although IBM had yet to introduce any version of a personal computer. Not surprisingly, as an example of the power of a brand widely used and trusted, the overwhelming preference by those surveyed was for a computer from IBM because many business were already using IBM mainframes and other equipment such as the Selectric© typewriter used to prepare documents.

17. The Apple Macintosh introduced many users in 1984 to the graphical interface and computer mouse we are familiar with today. Steve Job’s fascination with type fonts provided users with choices that help lead users to do graphical design on a computer instead of the traditional pen-and-pencil approach.

18. New Media Institute (2013).

19. The development of satellite technology is a story in its own right. Take a moment to consider how much our global economy depends on satellites monitoring our weather, enabling nearly immediate communication (some time lag because of distance exists) to all parts of the world, and providing information that allows us to readily determine our locations on the globe.

20. On a personal note, I benefitted from this recently when I required an emergency room visit while traveling. While I was checked in for examination, the local doctor was able to retrieve online all necessary medical and insurance information from my home medical clinic. Imagine how difficult that would have been to do and how much time it would have taken two decades ago even with express mail services and telephone access.

21. Many older professionals will remember the office debates comparing the merits and faults of printers using either PCL (printer control language) or Postscript commands. Major printer manufacturers often provided adapter modules to allow their PCL printer to print Postscript formatted documents and vice versa. Ultimately, the software applications evolved to accommodate different protocols so that users can buy any printer for their use without regard as to what internal control language it uses.

22. Sadly, this situation occurs often enough that faithful readers of Scott Adam’s Dilbert© cartoon strip about business activities should readily recognize his “Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services” character representing IT support.

Chapter 2

1. Denning and Bell (2012).

2. Shannon (1948).

3. Stevens (1956 and 1959); Wright (1997); and X-Rite (2007).

4. Stevens (1959).

5. A list of power series expansion approximations for common trigonometric, exponential, and logarithmic functions can be found by a simple search on the Internet. For example, see list at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SeriesExpansion.html

6. Besides, overall less ink is used with the CMYK approach, particularly when printing text and black ink is often slightly less expensive to produce than the other colors.

7. Tufte (2001).

8. Tufte (1990, 1997, and 2006).

9. These systems were often used in combination with overnight express services at the time because the packets of information for e-mail were often stored up for batch delivery during the night to reduce the considerable long-distance telephone costs incurred. Keep in mind that at that time we did not yet have the extensive infrastructure of microwave links, communication satellites, and cell towers many of us take for granted today.

10. This was particularly true when applying for a mortgage to buy a home in the 1960s through 1980s. For those of us moving to the western United States, mortgage approvals then were often done in a central office located in the eastern United States, necessitating a wait of up to four weeks before an approved contract was received after application. Any need by the approving office for additional information increased that time significantly. The increased use of Federal Express (now known as FedEx) shipments by businesses in the 1980s helped reduce the typical time by 2–3 weeks.

11. Amateur radio operators in the early days could send at higher speeds when they knew each other, and forms of shorthand code for common words and expressions were developed. For a recent article about code speeds, see Cornwell (2008). We can observe a modern version of this approach with the many abbreviated expressions used in texting and online social media.

12. These three descriptors appeared in an earlier paper by Laney (2001) describing a 3D data management approach.

13. The book by Chaffe-Stengel and Stengel (2011) discusses a number of ways in which variable data can be depicted, collected, and processed to provide results for decision processes.

14. I encountered this issue recently when reviewing a publisher’s homework tutorial program supplementing a textbook for business students. I kept getting the wrong answer for a number of more complex programs because the precision I was using was not the same as the program authors. When I pointed out that many business students use Excel and do not round off their input data, we corrected most of the problems by either specifying in the problem what precision to use or by widening the tolerance on the range of correct answers by 2% or 3%.

15. Big Data advocates argue that one should keep a record of such answers because, who knows, there might be an important correlation between those answers and a business objective.

Chapter 3

1. Microsoft^® Visio^® 2010 was used for all of the process model diagrams because the program offers all of the formats with easy-to-use drag-and-drop symbols to create a desired model quickly.

2. Hebb (2013).

3. Of course, this may be an incorrect assumption if seasonal product offerings cause much more disruption to basic operations than we would expect. How to deal with such a situation will be discussed in a following book, but for now we will assume that such variations have little effect.

4. Beverages are normally not made-to-stock because they can be prepared relatively quickly than cooked items and it is important they be served hot or cold. Maintaining the proper stock level for cooked foods made-to-stock is tricky since the time allowed before their flavor and taste is affected is not very long even when heat lamps are used.

5. Rummler and Brache (1990).

6. This is an important consideration often ignored when improving processes. The identification of value-added steps is often determined from the customer’s viewpoint, but some steps of no value to the customer are still necessary to satisfy internal business requirements.

Chapter 4

1. These offerings have helped me service my KitchenAid® mixer, repair the electric brakes on a trailer, review some statistics applications, and learn how to make sausage and bake croissants.

2. Hubbard (2010).

3. Silver (2012).

4. This added information sometimes leads to a conflict with the IT group responsible for maintaining a company’s database. Asking an IT group to add information in the database for the operations function just to prevent and solve problems or improve processes is often resisted if it requires increases in storage and processing capacity. This resistance is more likely to be strong if the IT group is held accountable for information processing costs. Such a situation is often resolved by the operations function by setting up their own internal database, a less effective solution from both overall business cost and information integrity viewpoints.

5. Several recent surveys report that the proportion of US citizens owning a smartphone exceeded 50% in 2012 and that smartphones purchases accounted for nearly 52% of total worldwide telephone sales during the same time period.

6. Rand McNally & Company (2008).

7. The inventory of supplies that may be needed to support these service activities is momentarily ignored here. They obviously need tracking and manual entry too, but are only indirectly connected to customer demand.

8. Woodland and Silver (1952).

9. One of my responsibilities during the late 1970s was fabricating Schottky diodes for use in railroad RFID tags. Many of these tags are still in use today and can be observed by motorists waiting for a freight train to pass across the road in front of them. This 3-inch-by-7-inch rectangular device is typically the same color as the frame supporting the rail car and is mounted on the lower right corner of the frame.

10. Brain (2013).

11. Foster (1966).

12. The location can be determined by triangulating the tag’s broadcast signal using several readers in different known locations or, more commonly these days, using a small GPS chip attached directly to the tag. Such tags are often used by wildlife study groups to track animals or birds of interest.

13. This capability certainly would have been useful in the days when I was managing R&D and manufacturing groups. Keeping our test equipment calibrated and locating a particular instrument that needed to be returned to the group or agency that had loaned it to us were frequent activities that often took more time than expected.

14. Although I personally do not approve of this application, the reader-equipped warehouse solution can be used to locate and track employees in large facilities by merely embedding an RFID tag in each of their employee ID badges.

15. IBM (2006).

16. Holloway (2006).

17. Zelbst and Sower (2012).

Chapter 5

1. Laney (2001).

2. During my working career in the high-tech industry, I was asked to solve a number of problems that were created by the cessation or unintentional alteration of ghost processes. Talking to the person who had done the work before the problem occurred was a key factor in finding a solution.

3. Some links to companies offering generic information software applications that could be adapted for use by an SMB without too much effort are listed in the References section under “Information Software Applications: Weblinks.” I do not endorse or recommend any of these solutions and only provide their URLs as a potential starting point for a search for an information software solution that best fits your business’s needs.

4. If you are interested in learning more about the possible origin of “Big Data,” an article by Steve Lohr (2013) in an issue of the NY Times is one place to begin.

5. An excellent example of applying Big Data solutions to a large image database was the rapid identification of suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Video and still photos were collected from a wide range of sources such as cell phones, security cameras, and newscast footage for the analysis and processed very quickly.

6. This term came into use in the early 1970s. For a more detailed history of the development of decision support systems, see the introduction by Power (2013).

7. Chapter 9 in Evans (2010) discusses the application of a number of such tools available in Excel for decision models.

8. Chaffe-Stengel and Stengel (2011).

9. Power (2013).

10. Kroenke (2011).

11. Baltzan et al. (2009).

12. Beaseley (n.d.).

13. Wailgum (2009).

14. A word to the wise manager: In some larger corporations this passive resistance can go as far as a department maintaining a duplicate database for local use or even continuing to use the old processes to do things while feeding the ERP system just enough data to keep it happy. This fact should not be too shocking because those of us who have worked as individual contributors in large organizations have all known of a group that at some time would shape up temporarily to pass a quality audit or other regularly scheduled inspection and then return to business as usual after the inspector left. When you become a manager or inspector, part of your basic responsibilities is to prevent this from happening or at least catch it when it does.

15. Shaw (2011).

16. Copy of Example 6.5 taken from Shaw (2011), pp. 96–97.

17. Pinedo (2008).

18. Recall the discussion regarding Shannon’s communication model shown in Fig. 1.1b

19. Stein and Katzenberg (circa mid-2000s).

20. If you are interested in learning more about the history of the PicturePhone, the following website is a good place to start: http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/telephones-picturephone.html

21. http://www.usbr.gov/projects/Project.jsp?proj_Name=Colorado%20River%20Basin%20Project&pageType=ProjectPage

22. http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wr/cwp/ops.html

Chapter 6

1. The old-time metal safe with the company’s ledger book inside comes to mind here.

2. The stated range for these devices is a conservative value that guarantees suitable reception within that range for all sorts of local conditions. The units on our farm in a rural area reliably access devices in outbuildings up to 200 feet away, and on some days I can even detect some neighbor’s wireless network even though the nearest neighbor is at least 1,200 feet from our house. However, a repeater is still needed for a reliable connection between devices on our upstairs and downstairs floors.

3. There are a number of password strength checkers available online such as the one at https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/pc-security/password-checker.aspx

4. This knowledge is useful to know in the event that one accidentally erases the only copy of some critical data and they failed to do a backup recently. Stop immediately before any new data are written to the disk and take your computer to a recovery expert to get the critical data back.

5. The author is speaking from personal experiences purchasing and selling properties in different states and counties during his life. While the retrieval processes are much better most agencies, the incompatibility between their databases and record systems remains the same.

6. Hubbard (2010).

Appendix A

1. In the early days of the World Wide Web when landline telephone systems were used for access, these collections and discussions were often referred to as bulletin boards or user forums.

2. This is often referred to as a swim-lane or Rummler–Brache (1990) diagram based on assigning a column or row for each functional area. This allows easier identification of communication needs between functions and how heavily that function is loaded. A similar approach is the service blueprint used to map customer interactions.

3. In more sophisticated treatments of front office activities, the steps are separated into two subgroups: those that require the participation of every customer served and those that may require further participation by some customers.

4. Little (1961). The proof of this relation was published first by Little, although others had used it without proof prior to his paper.

Appendix C

1. Shaw (2011).

2. Held (2007).

3. See Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons (2011), page 438 for the reasoning behind the derivation of this expression. For a more convenient method than using 12 random numbers for each value required, use Excel’s NORM.INV function.

4. Weida et al. (2001).

5. Winston (2004).

6. Harvey (2007).

7. Weida et al. (2001).

8. Jelen (2010, 2011).