Coming off the back of my post in the “What Do You Do?” thread, today, a report came in my email that marks a very delightful hallmark of my career.
In 2010, I moved to Texas for my job and met a woman by the name of Elvira. She was an older lady, maybe early 60s, and one of her weekly tasks was to produce an inbound forecast for our distribution hubs. It was a highly manual process involving greenbar paper and rulers, multiple Excel forms, a bunch of guessing, assumption and estimation, etc. It took her a WEEK to produce this report; she’d been doing this for about 10 years. Our [then] new team managed to automate some of the process, and got it down to three days after MONTHS of effort. Over out the next 10 years, Elvira retired (about 9 years ago,) and the forecast had changed hands a dozen times, each time finding its way inexorably back to me as the one constant in its life. It’s a massive pain in the ass; even when my titles changed, it found me because I was one of very few people (like 4 people) who knew how it worked. Alas, every Friday, I got it out by end of day like clockwork.
But today, at 8:30am, the report showed up in my inbox. It has been 100% automated after almost 20 years of its existence. Working with our team in India, we managed to make the whole thing effectively hands-free, and I never have to produce it again. I feel like a parent whose worthless problem child finally got a job and has moved out. In that same parental vein, it’s oddly sad because it doesn’t “need me” anymore; it’s all grown up and self-sufficient. I ran it the “old way” today to check and ensure its automated version married up (it did,) and now it’s all on its own.
I’ve archived the myriad Access databases, emailed all the people who emailed me daily reports for manual input and announced my “retirement” from the forecast. It’s a momentous day.
