COVID-19 Aftermath: What will change?

wayne said:
There’s a lot more to college than classrooms. I know I learned as much outside the classroom as inside; by that I mean outside the curriculum. My kids have learned quite a bit in the environment versus the classroom too. Our youngest learned a huge amount studying abroad in Peru. Life is very different in other countries, especially when one is not in a first world country.
Click to expand...

That's very true. My current university has a very active study abroad program, summer programs, not to mention the extracurricular activities that take place on campus, such as athletics and military training (it's a military college). Which all supports my contention that online learning is no substitute for the actual college experience.

This may help online learning though, and that’s a good thing.
Click to expand...

It's only a good thing if the online teaching is done well, is well thought-out and both the teachers and the tools are up to the job. We've had only a week to prepare to go 100% online for the first time. Already we're seeing problems caused by overloaded servers and network hardware, and I've made a couple of mistakes due to having to use features of our LMS that I wasn't familiar with. The experiment begins in earnest on Monday, and then we'll see how well prepared we really were.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
One other thing that seems to be happening is a LOT more video meetings than normal. Saw another video today where "Jennifer" went into the bathroom, forgetting that she was on video too... Yikes.
Click to expand...

Yeah we don’t do video streams at our company. We will present our desktops for presentations and whatnot, but we don’t sit there feeding video with our laptop cameras. I never even have my laptop open anyway since it’s on the docking station feeding the dual monitors. I can’t imagine what having a video feed for all participants really does for the conference call.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Yeah we don’t do video streams at our company. We will present our desktops for presentations and whatnot, but we don’t sit there feeding video with our laptop cameras. I never even have my laptop open anyway since it’s on the docking station feeding the dual monitors. I can’t imagine what having a video feed for all participants really does for the conference call.
Click to expand...

Well, it lets ya see Jennifer without pants! :rofl:

But yeah, kind of a waste of bandwidth most of the time. Especially right now, there are so many people on the Internet all of a sudden that some things aren't working as well as they normally do.
 
I think our Govt. will put safeguards in place when new strains of flus are found in different parts of the world like cutting off flights from origin country much faster. Stock market won’t get back to 29k for 4 to 5 years. A 50% loss needs a 100% gain and that normally takes 7 years in the stock market... and I think we have another 10 to 15% drop to go. General public will always have 2 Costco cases of toilet paper in their homes. Dooms day preppers are on cloud 9 right now.
 
Rgbeard said:
Same here - I wish the video conferencing would settle to about two.
Click to expand...

I worked in video conferencing when there were only two, and they cost a fortune.

MBDiagMan said:
In 1999 I implemented a project to roll out a new software product using A newfangled technology called WebEx...
Click to expand...

I interviewed with them before they had the ability to handle more than 480 lines simultaneously because they used my other employer’s audio product that I was already an expert on. They were still a long way to the Cisco acquisition. I heard the (very bright) Unix guy I interviewed with made serious money but it was severely diluted below his level. I ended up better off back at the manufacturer of the audio product later on.

As far as video conferencing goes, the vast majority of the time it’s useless. Nobody really needs to see people looking at monitors and ignoring their cameras. I had all sorts of video stuff on my desk and in my lab before anybody did it in desktop software. We were generally forced to use it so we pointed our cameras at our clocks so international callers knew what time it was. ;)

Screen sharing isn’t useless. That’s often useful. But talking heads not looking at cameras really is mostly useless. Has been since back when we told everyone it was great and sold it for tens of millions per company. :)

We use Google Meet/Hangouts at the current place. Works fine. I stick the app on my phone and mute video and audio always, unless talking. Then just audio. Ha.

Heard and seen a lot of people screw up on conference calls, but my favorite was a customer tech session planned late night where their director joined for a status update and promptly fell asleep snoring loudly and his parrots were talking and squawking at him. We listened to that for two hours while we talked over him.

Finally one of the customer’s managers had mercy on us all and rang the director’s cell phone to wake him up. He got loud enough we couldn’t work over him.

Way before video we had some mob guys using an operator assisted conference call to blackmail a guy. Operator heard it and we disabled their account and gave some billing excuse when they called to complain.

A large MLM had us play cassette tape recordings of their supposedly successful big wigs to hundreds who thought the guy was really presenting to them. That was always funny because they never paid their bills and the LLCs changed names all the time.

There’s others not as interesting too. I hung up on over 10,000 people one day. Ran a shutdown command in the wrong window. LOL. Oops.
 
Bell206 said:
I foresee a quarter to a third of certain overseas manufacture sites returning stateside with other "factories" accelerating their move out of China as was happening prior to the current outbreak. Plus I believe they'll finally fix the CDC procedural issues first discovered during the swine flu that unfortunately manifest themselves with this virus.
Click to expand...

azure said:
Many universities (including my former employer) have been offering courses online for several years now. I taught one on a regular basis, and that was more than 5 years ago.

I have always been of the opinion that the online version of the course was inferior to the in-person version. That could change, though, now that we have much higher bandwidth available in most parts of the country, allowing streaming video and real online "classrooms" via teleconference software like Go To Meeting.

If there is a change in attitudes toward online education after this experience, it will more likely be because it will be seen to actually work now. In the past, that was much less true.
Click to expand...

Certain disciplines like computer science and some liberal arts studies will go completely online. Engineering and sciences less so. I suspect those colleges with an emphasis on experiential learning will go up in demand because they cannot be replicated online.
 
upload_2020-3-22_11-44-6.png

Here is the table I tried to post Friday. This shows the timing and rate of the stock market rebound after the last health scares. I don’t remember the degree the markets previously dropped but my perception is this one is much worse.
 
Matthew said:
I suspect more people and companies will be doing more telecommuting.

I wonder about college and universities - once students, and parents, realize how much can be done online and at potentially a lower cost, how's that all going to turn out?

I'm not sure what sort of short or long term affect this will have on our border and immigration policies.
Click to expand...

I'm a PhD Candidate / college instructor right now. I think that in some ways what you're saying is true, but there's another thing people don't often consider when it comes to online classes, and that is the actual possible classwork. For an obvious example, consider the physical sciences. You can't really do equipment-heavy chemistry projects at home.

But take my field, for instance, which is Logistics and Supply Chain. I am teaching Stats, Supply Chain Management, and Business Strategy this semester. I have already engineered my syllabi that I use to be delivered in person or online, however I far prefer teaching face to face classes. In my stats classes I have my students do a group project at the end of the semester. They either do a secondary data project (so they aren't going and collecting data) or they do an article critique. They can do article critiques by themselves, which is what I'm going to have them do as my university has moved completely online for the rest of the spring semester. However, I've found that they get a lot our of working with their classmates because each of them has their own strengths. There are also technology programs that are very expensive, such as SAS and SPSS, that I can expose the students to in a university computer lab that aren't as easily available in an online format. The students CAN use the university's educational license, but they have to install and configure the program themselves which isn't always straightforward.

In my Supply Chain class I was going to have the students do a project with a supply chain modeling software system. It was a relatively new partnership with our school and I was going to be trained on the software prior to having my students work with it. That has gone out the window now and I feel that it is a lost opportunity to have my students do something really cool.

So yes, it is very possible to delivery high quality online content, and maybe I'm just old school but I really do think that there is an advantage to meeting with an instructor and other students face to face.
 
LoLPilot said:
I'm a PhD Candidate / college instructor right now. I think that in some ways what you're saying is true, but there's another thing people don't often consider when it comes to online classes, and that is the actual possible classwork. For an obvious example, consider the physical sciences. You can't really do equipment-heavy chemistry projects at home.

But take my field, for instance, which is Logistics and Supply Chain. I am teaching Stats, Supply Chain Management, and Business Strategy this semester. I have already engineered my syllabi that I use to be delivered in person or online, however I far prefer teaching face to face classes. In my stats classes I have my students do a group project at the end of the semester. They either do a secondary data project (so they aren't going and collecting data) or they do an article critique. They can do article critiques by themselves, which is what I'm going to have them do as my university has moved completely online for the rest of the spring semester. However, I've found that they get a lot our of working with their classmates because each of them has their own strengths. There are also technology programs that are very expensive, such as SAS and SPSS, that I can expose the students to in a university computer lab that aren't as easily available in an online format. The students CAN use the university's educational license, but they have to install and configure the program themselves which isn't always straightforward.

In my Supply Chain class I was going to have the students do a project with a supply chain modeling software system. It was a relatively new partnership with our school and I was going to be trained on the software prior to having my students work with it. That has gone out the window now and I feel that it is a lost opportunity to have my students do something really cool.

So yes, it is very possible to delivery high quality online content, and maybe I'm just old school but I really do think that there is an advantage to meeting with an instructor and other students face to face.
Click to expand...
I also think a brick and mortar university is best for a lot of reasons. But I think a lot of other people are going to question that and make other choices.
 
I feel for the graduating college seniors. Many of them had been in school the last 3 years looking at getting into a booming economy and probably most of them had job offers waiting.
 
LoLPilot said:
I'm a PhD Candidate / college instructor right now... my field, for instance, which is Logistics and Supply Chain. I am teaching Stats, Supply Chain Management, and Business Strategy this semester.
Click to expand...
Being that you have more expertise than most of us, do you foresee the industry implementing long term changes from lessons learned due to the recent shortages? Or do they see it solely as a temporary anomaly?
 
weilke said:
We'll see at the tail end, but so far I have a hard time concluding that a centrally planned health buerocracy a la Italy is the way to go.
Click to expand...

Not saying central planned is the answer. Just saying the current structure is not geared to meet this situation.
Any other solution; will require money and political capital. A pragmatic solution will require leadership; which has been lacking for a while.

Tim
 
asicer said:
Being that you have more expertise than most of us, do you foresee the industry implementing long term changes from lessons learned due to the recent shortages? Or do they see it solely as a temporary anomaly?
Click to expand...

I would view it as an anomaly. So the concepts behind it aren't terribly difficult. Basically, companies don't want to keep a TON of inventory on hand anymore. So what many companies work on is a semi - just in time system using what is known as "safety stock" to absorb minor fluctuations. Forecasting tools have become very good, and so companies will set inventory levels based upon projected demand and volatility numbers. Too little and you have a stockout (lost sales and goodwill) and too much and you have large sunk costs, possible obsolescence, spoilage, and then you're sitting on assets when it's tax time. The chains are ordinarily pretty robust and can handle single disruptions pretty well. Supplier disruptions, individual market demand runs, etc. The problem we have here is that we've had both. This is really an unprecedented situation. On one hand, China stopped shipping materials for a while. Then this supply interruption spread - now Italy is shutting down all industry for two weeks.

Ordinarily that wouldn't have been a huge problem, more of an annoyance and a blip on the radar. But then you had panic buying, and not just in one market. The entire CONUS, Great Britain, France, Germany, etc. The safety stock placed at different points in the chain was quickly bought up. This creates a supply shortage. Customers get panicky and now when any of the new supply appears they buy it up immediately. This isn't a "normal" condition. It's also not easy to scale up to the supply systems to the point that supply could fill the panic demand and simultaneously replenish safety stocks across entire supply networks. Once everything returned to normal you'd have enormous overcapacities that would also be damaging to companies.

I think that if anything, companies may focus on greater agility and scalability. So the ability to rapidly expand and contract production levels, though how they go about doing that will be very company or industry dependent.

TL;DR: Do I think that companies will learn from this? Of course they will. But I think that this will be filed under "crisis operations" rather than being incorporated into normal operations, because this is hardly a "normal" demand pattern.
 
It is kinda fun to read the opinions on distance education and remote management. My parents were early distance ed college professors. They actually were pioneers teaching computer programming and psychology in the mid 80s; over cable broadcasts and phone based conference calls. So, I have been around distance education till they retired just over a decade ago. I have at the same time been managing development teams around the world; even managing 24x7 development with teams rolling by timezone for twenty years.
So I have a fair amount of remote expierence.

There really only a few lessons most people miss.
1. Not everyone is suited by personality to work/study remote or manage those who work/study remote.
2. Many aspects have to be rethought. And this takes skill to learn and practice. Everything from how assignments are done/developed to how evaluation is completed.
3. Not everything is better online.

Tim
 
LoLPilot said:
TL;DR: Do I think that companies will learn from this? Of course they will. But I think that this will be filed under "crisis operations" rather than being incorporated into normal operations, because this is hardly a "normal" demand pattern.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do wonder how "crisis operations" will differ in the future compared to today, though.
 
asicer said:
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do wonder how "crisis operations" will differ in the future compared to today, though.
Click to expand...

Great question. I'd suspect that two things would be the focus. The first is greater agility. The second is greater visibility, which is a constant in SCM. This sort of plays into a phenomenon called the Bullwhip Effect, which is basically an amplification of demand variation as we move up the supply chain (towards the raw material suppliers). Generally it refers to a lack of communication and visibility upstream, but the lack of visibility can cause problems in reverse, too. For instance, Person A panics and decides to go buy a month's worth of toilet paper. They get to Wal Mart and TP is almost out. They buy the remainder and immediately drive to CostCo. CostCo still has some, but now Person A is full-on berserker. They don't buy one month's worth, now they buy two, because they saw empty shelves at Wal Mart and think that this is the last TP they will see for years, if possibly ever! Now person B goes to Wal Mart and it's out. They go to Cost Co and there's very little left. They buy Cost Co out and go to Sam's.... etc. Neither Person A nor Person B stops to think about the fact that there are trucks enroute to deliver more TP, and that there are factories making TP and loading it on to trucks to go to DC's. The issue is that people are now buying it faster than firms can make it and get it to stores through distributors, and this feeds public panic which causes them to buy MORE when it does become available. I've linked an article below that touches on this... it's not even a one time run on supplies, it is a sustained run that causes problems. Is there really a way that you can effectively plan for that? The probability of this kind of event is considered so low, and the cost of having an effective contingency plan to completely remedy the problem so high, that most companies decide "if it happens we'll have to deal with it." It's sort of the equivalent of, "do I buy a second brand-new car just in case I have a critical meeting at work that I can't miss and my normal car won't start?" Maybe if we're talking VP of North American Operations, then yeah. But if we're talking "Marketing Manager for the Cincinnati regional area," then probably not. It would be a nice thing to have, but the probability of the failure mode situation and the cost of the solution are simply too disparate to make it feasible.

https://laist.com/2020/03/17/when-will-everything-be-back-in-stores-toilet-paper-medicine-food.php
 
@LoLPilot

Handle it they way we always have. Merchants place limits on purchases. This generally slows the run down enough the supply evens out fairly quickly. We are already seeing it here with TP.

Tim
 
Our closet grocery store is still out of all paper goods as of an hour ago. And no onions or potatoes.
 
tspear said:
@LoLPilot

Handle it they way we always have. Merchants place limits on purchases. This generally slows the run down enough the supply evens out fairly quickly. We are already seeing it here with TP.

Tim
Click to expand...

Yeah, and that has to be handled at the retailer level.
 
@LoLPilot

Very good responses and is some of that is very much what we are seeing in the O&G market. I work with the supply chain guys as a controller at a mfg company on the production-end of O&G. Seeing the bullwhip and other effects when spot oil prices have large swings is always tough to navigate from a supply aspect. We use safety stocks/Kanban systems which are adjusted to maintain a given level of consumption. However, when oil drops $40/bbl in a few weeks span, the upstream visibility from drilling rigs and operators goes out the window. You can’t plan for that and it causes an abrupt train wreck in supply chains as everyone pushes orders out 6 months or sometimes a year out. Customers balk, we balk, our suppliers balk, etc. until enough time goes by when we can absorb the inventory and readjust to the “new normal”.
 
I have found the elastic point for purchases of O&G requires that supply and demand be held very close in sync. Multiple times I have discussed ways to use something like the SPR to manage the over/under supply in some way to reduce the whipsaw effect. The idea would be slow the price fluctuation down to give producers more time to adjust. However, no matter how many times I have discussed the idea. I have never seen a workable solution.

Until such a solution exists, or we do not depend on O&G, the whipsaw potential will always exist.

Tim
 
SoonerAviator said:
@LoLPilot

Very good responses and is some of that is very much what we are seeing in the O&G market. I work with the supply chain guys as a controller at a mfg company on the production-end of O&G. Seeing the bullwhip and other effects when spot oil prices have large swings is always tough to navigate from a supply aspect. We use safety stocks/Kanban systems which are adjusted to maintain a given level of consumption. However, when oil drops $40/bbl in a few weeks span, the upstream visibility from drilling rigs and operators goes out the window. You can’t plan for that and it causes an abrupt train wreck in supply chains as everyone pushes orders out 6 months or sometimes a year out. Customers balk, we balk, our suppliers balk, etc. until enough time goes by when we can absorb the inventory and readjust to the “new normal”.
Click to expand...

Sorry for going a bit off topic from the thread but wow that is a tough industry. My first year my statistical modeling class was divided up into groups and we were told to build models to predict fluctuations in natural gas prices. Turns out the reason was that a NG company in the midwest had contacted the university about trying to get better predictive pricing models. So when all the groups were in the midst of building these things using the datasets that our professor gave us he said, "Oh by the way this is real data from XXXXX and they're hoping that you can improve on their models. You'll be presenting your models to them at the end of term." No pressure! So my team developed both a time series model and a regression model. I was in the regression model subgroup and we got an R-Square (basically a measure of model effectiveness on a scale of 0 - 1 with 1 being perfect and 0 being of no value) of something like 0.4. I was sort of embarrassed to present the model. After all the groups presented one of the execs from this company took the floor and told us that they were super impressed by what we'd done, and even mentioned that the regression model we built actually outperformed the one that they were using. Then he gave us the number of dollars made and lost based on their price hedging operations and I was shocked. My hat is off to you.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
One other thing that seems to be happening is a LOT more video meetings than normal. Saw another video today where "Jennifer" went into the bathroom, forgetting that she was on video too... Yikes.
Click to expand...
I know we're probably odd this way but we've always kept both our clean and dirty laundry in the laundry room. We have shelves set up where the folded clean laundry goes. It comes out of the dryer, gets folded and goes right onto the shelves in that room. So much simpler than carrying it through the house and putting it in drawers or in the closet in the bedroom. Only stipulation is every morning you have to do a naked walk from the bathroom end of the house to the laundry end of the house.

So my wife my wife was in the kitchen on an early morning webex last week and she happily announced to the group that her husband had just walked naked through the room off camera. Once I was dressed I had to step into frame and say hi to everyone. They were all very entertained by this. This is the new world we're living in.
 
On a group of former employees of the company that built the first four talker digital conference audio bridge... (we later learned a two and a half talker algorithm is ideal...)...

We collectively realized that conference tech and later SIP telephony, are literally saving lives right now.

Kinda neat to have been there fairly close to the beginning of it. My tech career started as a conference call operator. Back when you needed an operator to have one.

Also caught up with co-workers on the details of getting 95% of our staff out of the building. One mentioned, “And then I used the automation you set up for laptops to push VPN clients, the telephony control software, and now a soft phone, to all machines just by flipping the group and hitting deploy. Whole company took one hour and we sent all the desktop machines home with people including the call center. We flipped the desk phones individually to VPN/off-site mode and those went too.”

My grumpy cold automation-writing sysadmin heart grew three times that day.

Hell YES. Buying the right gear and deploying it correctly PAID OFF! Looooooove it. We’ve had ZERO tech downtime pushing everyone off site EXCEPT Microsoft uhh, whatever they renamed Great Plains to. Their official word? “Don’t run it over a VPN”. Eff you Microsoft.

My co-worker fired up two Terminal Servers for RDP and had Accounting use those. Stupid frogging Microsoft garbage. He kicked its ass.

Colorado just asked companies to get everyone off site if possible otherwise mandatory staff reduction to 50%. We counted 12 people still in the building Friday, three unnecessary who have their own offices and were isolated. Looks like it’ll be down to about six and that dept can decide if they shut down, or create distance between people. They can’t work off site.

The only minor annoyance is people not used to the building alarm system keep tripping it. A few of us can see the cameras and kill it remotely. Cops probably won’t come anyway. :)

Yessssss! Tech done right. We designed it to get half the building off site but never had to do it and couldn’t test it. It took double the design load and didn’t care at all!

Two guys got everyone configured and out the door in two days.

I still remember the owner (who we rarely see, he’s got multiple businesses), asking me personally if we needed to buy that phone system, and repeating the cost estimate we gave him. I looked him right in the eye and said “yes”.

Did a fist pump when I heard this last night!!!
 
How much do you want to bet that tsa starts taking everyone's temperature. Our better yet gets a new million dollar scanner of some sort. For safety! (Never mind all the politicians invested in the company making them)
 
The better question is what won't change.

Look at 9/11 - it was used to justify the nationalization of airport security, acceleration of the surveillance state (FISA, data monitoring, etc.), state and local authorities providing some police with paramilitary gear, limitations on freedom of movement, additional border controls, a couple of wars (er, military actions), RealID aka national ID, additional banking regulations & surveillance, and any number of other things.

This will be no different. There will be a lot of changes, even if some elected official says "nothing will change".
 
Everyone will understand that emerging diseases are a fact of life, that in the grand scheme of things they are a small threat to our health and that the best approach is a coordinated and measured one.




I think.
 
I think of it as the world has pressed the RESET button. Hopefully we have learned from our mistakes and rebuild it better this time.
 
I hope people will better take care of themselves, eat healthier, exercise, and abstain from smoking, vaping, excessive drinking, drug use, etc. Basically have your body better poised to deal with the stress and strain of sickness.
 
denverpilot said:
On a group of former employees of the company that built the first four talker digital conference audio bridge... (we later learned a two and a half talker algorithm is ideal...)...

We collectively realized that conference tech and later SIP telephony, are literally saving lives right now.

Kinda neat to have been there fairly close to the beginning of it. My tech career started as a conference call operator. Back when you needed an operator to have one.

Also caught up with co-workers on the details of getting 95% of our staff out of the building. One mentioned, “And then I used the automation you set up for laptops to push VPN clients, the telephony control software, and now a soft phone, to all machines just by flipping the group and hitting deploy. Whole company took one hour and we sent all the desktop machines home with people including the call center. We flipped the desk phones individually to VPN/off-site mode and those went too.”

My grumpy cold automation-writing sysadmin heart grew three times that day.

Hell YES. Buying the right gear and deploying it correctly PAID OFF! Looooooove it. We’ve had ZERO tech downtime pushing everyone off site EXCEPT Microsoft uhh, whatever they renamed Great Plains to. Their official word? “Don’t run it over a VPN”. Eff you Microsoft.

My co-worker fired up two Terminal Servers for RDP and had Accounting use those. Stupid frogging Microsoft garbage. He kicked its ass.

Colorado just asked companies to get everyone off site if possible otherwise mandatory staff reduction to 50%. We counted 12 people still in the building Friday, three unnecessary who have their own offices and were isolated. Looks like it’ll be down to about six and that dept can decide if they shut down, or create distance between people. They can’t work off site.

The only minor annoyance is people not used to the building alarm system keep tripping it. A few of us can see the cameras and kill it remotely. Cops probably won’t come anyway. :)

Yessssss! Tech done right. We designed it to get half the building off site but never had to do it and couldn’t test it. It took double the design load and didn’t care at all!

Two guys got everyone configured and out the door in two days.

I still remember the owner (who we rarely see, he’s got multiple businesses), asking me personally if we needed to buy that phone system, and repeating the cost estimate we gave him. I looked him right in the eye and said “yes”.

Did a fist pump when I heard this last night!!!
Click to expand...

Awesome, I bet that feels good. As far as the Microsoft - Great Plains issue, I think the more pertinent question is why anyone is operating on Great Plains software anymore, lol. Good lord that's a relic. May as well be using Lotus 1-2-3 to record your accounting transactions, lol. I did have to manage some stuff in Microsoft Solomon for a short period when we acquired a foreign company out of Estonia, and it was similar to using Quick Books, but hardly something a multi-million dollar business should be using.
 
Well, China has banned the wild meat trade for now. Stop eating bats and anteaters. With a country packed in like sardines, they need to start getting their **** together.
 
Velocity173 said:
Well, China has banned the wild meat trade for now. Stop eating bats and anteaters. With a country packed in like sardines, they need to start getting their **** together.
Click to expand...

That'll be a challenge. Look around yourself how many ignorant idiots you encounter in a day. China has a population of 1.45bil, if 1% are morons, that exceeds the population of NYC.

In the middle of the Corona outbreak in china, someone was stopped at Dulles with a bag of 'catfood' in his luggage:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/trav...d-birds-washington-dulles-airport/4721804002/
 
LoLPilot said:
Great question. I'd suspect that two things would be the focus. The first is greater agility. The second is greater visibility, which is a constant in SCM. This sort of plays into a phenomenon called the Bullwhip Effect, which is basically an amplification of demand variation as we move up the supply chain (towards the raw material suppliers). Generally it refers to a lack of communication and visibility upstream, but the lack of visibility can cause problems in reverse, too. For instance, Person A panics and decides to go buy a month's worth of toilet paper. They get to Wal Mart and TP is almost out. They buy the remainder and immediately drive to CostCo. CostCo still has some, but now Person A is full-on berserker. They don't buy one month's worth, now they buy two, because they saw empty shelves at Wal Mart and think that this is the last TP they will see for years, if possibly ever! Now person B goes to Wal Mart and it's out. They go to Cost Co and there's very little left. They buy Cost Co out and go to Sam's.... etc. Neither Person A nor Person B stops to think about the fact that there are trucks enroute to deliver more TP, and that there are factories making TP and loading it on to trucks to go to DC's. The issue is that people are now buying it faster than firms can make it and get it to stores through distributors, and this feeds public panic which causes them to buy MORE when it does become available. I've linked an article below that touches on this... it's not even a one time run on supplies, it is a sustained run that causes problems. Is there really a way that you can effectively plan for that? The probability of this kind of event is considered so low, and the cost of having an effective contingency plan to completely remedy the problem so high, that most companies decide "if it happens we'll have to deal with it." It's sort of the equivalent of, "do I buy a second brand-new car just in case I have a critical meeting at work that I can't miss and my normal car won't start?" Maybe if we're talking VP of North American Operations, then yeah. But if we're talking "Marketing Manager for the Cincinnati regional area," then probably not. It would be a nice thing to have, but the probability of the failure mode situation and the cost of the solution are simply too disparate to make it feasible.

https://laist.com/2020/03/17/when-will-everything-be-back-in-stores-toilet-paper-medicine-food.php
Click to expand...
That scenario explains how a wave of panic buying gets sustained, but how does it start? And I mean, for items for which there is no logical reason to expect a shortage. Take toilet paper, for example, as you mentioned... I can see one or two people getting this hare-brained idea that there is going to be a shortage... but for the phenomenon to take root over a wide area, lots of people in different parts of the country have to get the same idea, seemingly at the same time. Where is this notion coming from? Is there some source of disinformation out there flooding the internet with fake warnings about TP shortages?
 
Jim K said:
How much do you want to bet that tsa starts taking everyone's temperature. Our better yet gets a new million dollar scanner of some sort. For safety! (Never mind all the politicians invested in the company making them)
Click to expand...

The TSA checkpoint is more of a threat right now than terrorism. Close contact and everybody touching everything. I hated it when I flew back Friday.

Here, let’s funnel all these people to one spot and have them touch bins and maybe each other and cough in the millimeter-wave scanner... or agree to have themselves fondled by a possibly sick TSA staffer.

Stupid stupid stupid. And not a cleaning product in sight.
 
denverpilot said:
“And then I used the automation you set up for laptops to push VPN clients, the telephony control software, and now a soft phone, to all machines just by flipping the group and hitting deploy. Whole company took one hour and we sent all the desktop machines home with people including the call center. We flipped the desk phones individually to VPN/off-site mode and those went too.”

My grumpy cold automation-writing sysadmin heart grew three times that day.

Hell YES. Buying the right gear and deploying it correctly PAID OFF! Looooooove it.
Click to expand...

Yessss! Gotta love it when being a geek and spending the money and writing the automation pays off. Hopefully they recognize your efforts and listen to you the next time you tell them you need to automate something.

We’ve had ZERO tech downtime pushing everyone off site EXCEPT Microsoft uhh, whatever they renamed Great Plains to. Their official word? “Don’t run it over a VPN”. Eff you Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Microsoft Dynamics GP. Sage is the same way.

I still remember the owner (who we rarely see, he’s got multiple businesses), asking me personally if we needed to buy that phone system, and repeating the cost estimate we gave him. I looked him right in the eye and said “yes”.
Click to expand...

Next time you see him... Maybe thank him for listening and spending the money, and explain how it helped.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top