Never Let them Tell you it Can't Be Done!

Do you consider yourself to be an innovator?

Or as you build your career do you aspire to become one?

If either of the above statements apply to you, there's nine words you must take to heart and never forget each time you discover an anomaly or improvement opportunity...

"Never Let them Tell you it Can't Be Done!"

Our world is full of problems and opportunities looking for solutions that you can find.

Unfortunately, it's also full of people who think they know it all and are familiar with all the potential solutions, many of whom in my experience seemingly like to work in IT!

These are the people I encountered numerous times in my career, who when I saw a potential technology solution to a real work problem they actually had the audacity to tell me that "It could not be done."

Fortunately even though I was quite young and at the start of my career, every time I was told this my immediate reaction was to call "Bullsh!t" on these naysayers and truly believed that "There must be a way this can be done!"

But I didn't just call BS, I also immediately set about finding the needed solution...

The trade journal article shared below covers one of the earlier occurrences of the "It can't be done!" phenomena.

In our HBC Furniture warehouse we were having significant issues with inventory accuracy due to the use of handwritten and keyed putaway slips which process has like 8 potential sources of error. As wireless RF handheld units for warehouses were now appearing on the scene I made the proclamation to the rest of our Logistics team and our IT Department of close to 800 people that I wanted to implement barcode putaway to rectify these discrepancies.

Little did I know how excited this would get our IT folks who immediately brought in outside IT Advisors to assist us with this new technology need in our warehouse. Immediately one of their systems partners was brought in and together they made an LCD presentation that this was indeed the latest and greatest, but to implement we'd also have buy a new Warehouse Management System (WMS) of which we already had one that worked just fine. In the end the bottom line was that we could do this and they would help us but the bill would be $600,000.

When I explained that at the most annual savings would be $150,000 or less representing a 4 year payback this was when I first heard those fateful words.

"They told me it couldn't be done..."

As mentioned earlier, this is one of the worst things you can say to me as I was determined, and was sure there had to be a way to accomplish the above without spending $600,000 dollars on a new system.

So I set about on my search and one of my early stops was Teklogix a great Canadian RF device success story who at that time only had a small unit in an industrial strip building in Mississauga.

Quickly I booked time to go out and meet with them to discuss the technology and my needs in this case and after my explanation they said that unfortunately their currently available technology would not support what I was trying to do. However, they did say that in the back they were working on a new technology not yet introduced to the market called Tekscan Screen Formatter Optimizer (TSFO for short) which they thought might work.

Told them honestly that I had no budget for this project, however if we could prove that this would work and cost effectively solve the problem we were facing that the project could be made to work. This approach became my modus operandi in number of future projects where I just told vendors that "I'm from Missouri" so please just show us that your solution works cost effectively and we would then get the funds we needed. For more on this see my earlier post "Making the Linkage Between Innovation and Shadow IT" for more hints on how to harness Shadow IT to support innovation.

Of course to prove this technology and method would work I did need some co-operation from IT to connect one RF Network Controller and gen 1 RF Device to our test system at the main data center. One more time I was told by all involved that I was wasting my time, but they gave us the needed connections and a small test area to set it up in. The last thing they said was OK here you go, knock yourself out, but your approach won't work.

So the Teklogix programmer and myself locked ourselves in the room for two days and successfully connected the RF Device to our test system! In fact once completed, it looked like a custom system, and in addition to putaways, we found we could also automate the relocate/slot consolidation functions as well as cycle counting/inventory checks.

Even though we were able to do this rapidly, it took a couple weeks to get all the relevant people back into a meeting at the data center who just a few weeks earlier had told us this could not be done.

We had all our IT folks in the room, including the outside IT Advisor representatives and their Systems Partners and made a presentation which explained the solution we had found.

Next we pulled back the room divider and I said the following joyful words:

"Not only can it be done, but here it is!"

We gave them a full demo of the functionality live on the test system and following implementation this solution worked flawlessly for almost 20 years before they replaced the entire system with a modern best of breed packaged solution.

The solution we had found, designed implemented and created in record time only cost $150,000 including hardware and implementation, not the $600,000 we were told was needed.

In addition, due to this solution we ultimately achieved a 99.9% inventory accuracy by both sku and location which was one of the best inventory accuracy results ever.

Decades and 100's of innovations later I have to say this approach has served me well and even when I couldn't immediately find the right solution, I always tucked the idea away into the back of my head, so when I saw the technology needed to solve I was ready to match it with the known problem or opportunity already identified.

In order for this personal innovation hack to be most effective, it's imperative that each time you hear of a new or improved technology that you throw your mind at it, learn the basics, understand it to the point where you can then test against your mental archive of unsolved problems and opportunities.

Today solutions for automation, blockchain and semantic data are ones you may like to put some focus on, and as Satya Nadella CEO of Microsoft just said this week, what you and your company want to become are not "know-it-alls: but rather "learn-it alls."

Remember, never let anyone tell you something can't be done, just nod your head and then set out to research, understand and trial potential solutions to learn about and discover what's needed to actually create the solution you envision.

If you're like me you'll find much joy both in the process of discovery, and completing the solution, opening up both your career and yourself to a future of infinite possibility.

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

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