Kaizen of the Month for May 2007: Windows Hack *or* Chopping Away at the Six Big Losses

Jeez – you got me to spend about 30 seconds trying to “restart later” because I thought Windows was really trying to remind me!
That’s the beauty of Linux, all the layers of crap attempting to improve on a flawed operating system at the bottom are stripped away. I’d switch to Linux but don’t have a 12-year-old in my household to do it for all the computers we use. (One is completely unusable because we tried to install a copy of Windows XP. Linux is open source and wouldn’t care.)
Similarly, a major auto company redoing and extending its order-to-delivery system is condemning itself to continued waste in all sorts of ways. It’s layering on top of MRP, and preserving all sorts of constraints, including one that is a survival of the days of keypunched IBM cards. One new routine they’re putting in place is to be written in COBOL, one of the early higher-level layers. It will run with every order – millions – and not all that fast. My about-to-retire spouse tried to explain how the routine should be written in assembly language – he says it would be so reliable that the programmer could die and it would never need maintenance – and run a thousand times (my exaggeration probably) faster because it’s a closer layer to the bits that actually constitute the computer. But the current folks are afraid of a language that lives mostly in legend at their age. And they don’t want to find one of the few gray-haired brainy guys still around who understand it.