The Electronic Document & Me

The Discovery of the “Oh Shit!” Phenomenon

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve posted anything. As I said in my original “The Electronic Document & Me” entry I had intended to post regularly about my experiences in the electronic document industry. But after publishing a number of articles I checked to see how many people were actually reading them.

The number was embarrassingly small. So that, along with being distracted by other interests – taking care of my wonderful granddaughters and fishing – I decided to put it aside for a while.

Then one day last summer just after I’d landed a healthy 15 inch large mouth bass at one of my favorite fishing spots, I got a call from my old friend and colleague, Pete Mier. Pete called to suggest I check out an article posted on LinkedIn by a woman with whom we’d both worked. He said I was one of the few people he knew who would appreciate the article.

After we talked for a while about personal things he asked if I had any regrets about retiring from the industry. The only one I could think of was that I’d put aside my writing due to lack of interest on the part of LinkedIn users. I said that having 25 or 30 people interested in what I had to say was sort of disheartening and I didn’t see any reason to go on writing.

Pete told me that it wasn’t really 25 or 30 – that he had found it necessary to log on and read my articles multiple times to understand what I was talking about. So around 20 was probably more accurate! I thanked him so much for calling and making my day and asked him to never call again!

So, if you read this and don’t find anything of value please contact Pete and tell him not to give me any sort of encouragement – even if it’s negative. That’s PETE MIER – M-I-E-R. Here’s the link to his LinkedIn profile page: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/petemier/

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I’m skipping ahead a couple years from my last entry. Maybe I’ll go back to fill things in if I have the time or inclination. Suffice it to say that through a series of career moves and coincidences I found myself working for Johnson & Quin in 1991.

The owner and president of J&Q, Dave Henkel once told me that when his HR person showed him my resume he thought it was a put-on. It seems that I was the only person they’d found who had experience in the document integrity (what’s now called the Automated Document Factory) space.

Prior to joining J&Q I was integral in FormScan’s pioneering efforts in the sales and marketing of the FormScan Integrity Monitoring System (FIMS) in the U.S. After over 6 years with FormScan I decided it was time to move on so I sent my resume to J&Q knowing that they were the only competitor FormScan had. There’s a long, entertaining story about how FormScan and J&Q wound up as competitors but I’ll save it for another time.

While FIMS relied on a barcode scanner mounted in the paper path of a Xerox 9790, J&Q had engineered their system – the JQ/D2 – as a piece of in-line finishing equipment that received printed pages via what was called the by-pass transport which redirected pages from the output tray. I’m not going to go into detail on the relative pros and cons of each approach since at this point the differences are meaningless.

What’s important is that they were the first systems to address the need to monitor the accuracy and quality of documents printed on production speed laser printers. More importantly, FormScan and J&Q were the first organizations to understand the need for such capabilities and the first to attempt to convince users of production speed lasers of that need.

Which gets to the point of this article. In the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties the vast majority of laser printer users either had no idea that their printers might not print what they thought they were printing or knew but didn’t want to investigate ways to rectify the situation. It’s sort of like the old story of a polling organization that asked Americans how they felt about ignorance and apathy – 50% of respondents said they didn’t know, the other half said they didn’t care.

One of the challenges both FormScan and J&Q had to overcome was the insistence on the part of the hardware vendors that their products were faultless. More than one operation or production executive told me that his hardware rep told him their equipment never missed or duplicated pages. You may laugh at this now but in those days this was a common belief.

The other big challenge is the human tendency to ignore problems until it’s almost too late – the old, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. If I tried to recount the number of times I was told by operations & production people, “it’s never happened to us” this article would be at least twice as long. Of course, the word missing from, “it’s never happened to us” is “yet”. If there’s a potential for errors in any given process every day that goes by is another day closer to it raising its ugly head. And the phrase most frequently uttered when that day comes is, “oh shit!”

For example, in 1991 or ’92 at an Xplor event in New England I was approached by some folks from a large Massachusetts-based insurance company. They asked what the JQ/D2 was all about. After I explained how it read bar codes on each page of a printed document, verified accuracy and eliminated duplicates, they basically said, “That’s nice but we don’t need it”. I asked why. They said their operation had never produced error pages of any sort. I asked a few more questions but seeing how convinced they were I backed off and thanked them for stopping by.

A month or so later they called and asked if I could pay them a visit to explain again about how the JQ/D2 worked. After arranging the appointment, I asked what happened. One of their Xerox 9790 MICR printers (they had several) had somehow printed thousands of duplicate checks. The mistake hadn’t been caught until their bank notified their CFO. The CFO of course notified the head of operations – the person who had called me. When I visited them a couple of weeks later I asked what he said when he got the call from the CFO. He told me he had said, “Oh shit”…

A few years later at the 1995 Xplor Global Conference in Minneapolis I was approached by the head of operations for a large telephone company. We had a conversation similar to the one I’d had with the insurance company. His excuse for not being interested was – and I’m not making this up – “We have iron-clad manual quality control procedures”. I thought that such a thing most likely doesn't exist but seeing his conviction I didn't argue the point.

Again, a month or so later he called to asked again about how we might help him. It turned out that his “iron-clad manual” procedures had failed (I heard later that they were actually nonexistent) and they’d printed tens of thousands of phone bills that had mixed the account information of one person with the call details of someone else.

I learned sometime later that the operations manager had been demoted to third shift supervisor because of the mistake. Not sure exactly when he said, “oh shit” but I’m absolutely certain he said it somewhere along the way.

There are numerous stories that followed the same pattern. People rejected the idea of monitoring printer output until the necessity became glaringly obvious – with either serious financial or career implications. Sometimes both.

But let me end on a high note. The two organizations that were the most proactive in addressing the need to verify output were – and I know you’ll find this difficult to believe – the United States Postal Service and the United States Department of the Treasury. Both understood the risks associated with invalid output and both weren’t at all reluctant to make the investments necessary to eliminate those risks.

The USPS implemented a system in their payroll operation at Ft. Snelling, MN. On my first visit there I asked the director in charge why he wanted to verify the output of their laser printers. He said – and again I’m not making this up – “Scott, don’t you realize we’re the postal service? If someone doesn’t get paid someone might get shot!” That might have been the best buying signal I ever got in my career.

The Treasury Department implemented systems in multiple locations around the country. During one of my first meetings with them I asked why they wanted to ensure the quality of their output. One of them told me, “Scott, if your grandmother doesn’t get her social security check she doesn’t call us, she calls her congressman!”

And as we all know, shit rolls downhill.