I know what this process needs: Microsoft Access!
Who, Me? A tale of discounts and process improvement via the magic of Excel, Access and a fair bit of electronic duct tape we imagine. Welcome to Who, Me? « James » is the Regomized reader of record today, and continues the theme of running the risk of doing a job just that little bit too well with an ancedote from the end of the last century involving his first job out of university, at a certain telecommunications giant. The job involved a process of calculating the discount received by big customers (the ones with multiple branches). « For the life of me I can’t remember what the main DB was called, » he told us, « but it was the old style green writing on a black screen that took forever to download the necessary data. » « On the really big clients, » he added, « it could [take] 2-3 days with nothing for my team of four to do but twiddle our thumbs. » There was, however, a problem. There was no discount. The computers had ground their way through the data but, as far back as the 1980s, the customers had received nothing.
