Today I got introduced to the process we have to go through to for international shipments. If you got through my previous long post on the shipping process, I won’t deliver another and equally tedious description. Suffice to say that all that business about the difference between shipments, packages, invoices, orders, and so forth–well, all of that is repeated, independently, for international orders. Along with the standard paperwork, international orders require another set of paperwork, and as it involves different languages and different customs (pardon the pun) and large, long distance shipments, much more is at stake.

The system we must use for international shipments is based of off an Oracle platform. It is generally known as “Oracle” at Acme, and it is the new corporate standard that will eventually come to our site. This system was recently implemented at another site, an international site, and the result was an absolute confusion of orders that managed to hit twice, at the end of January and again quite late in February.

If we try very hard not to think about that, to think positively instead, we can hope that implementing the Oracle-based system at our site will eliminate the need for redundant papework. That would be nice. A small mercy, though, because from what I saw today, the Oracle system shares a weakness with our current system. In both cases, if you want to peform a routine, defined task, you have to go through far too many different screens. The process is so badly coordinated that you must remember to copy a number from one screen so that you will be able to paste it into another. Sheer interface idiocy!

Okay, time for a preschool lesson. The reason why the Windows operating system is part of what most people consider a normal computer is not because Windows has an inherently better underlying structure. It’s because any task that the developers could imagine people doing was carefully orchestrated by a “wizard,” a guided set of screens that bring you from the start of a task to the end with a minimum amount of effort by you, the user. Windows has always had some useless wizards and always lacked one or two, but overall the strategy of making routine tasks easy for most people (sorry, IT guys) pays off big.

Bad Oracle! Go home!

To be fair, Oracle may not be to blame. Oracle is basically a big robust engine. If you take a robust automobile engine, you can set it up for an SUV, or a work truck, or a sports car. You can use the same six or eight-cylinder engine block for a lot of different purposes. Oracle has to be adjusted to its purpose, and I don’t know who designed or delivered Acme’s package.

But the IT department had a jolly time getting it set up on my PC, because despite the fact that it is the Chosen One, there is no standardized or documented end-user setup procedure. Oh, and while they were trying to set it up on my particular PC, the whole national system was going down. That didn’t help much.

It is not too late for our Oracle system to be further adjusted, especially before it is set up at our site. In fact they did ask for improvement suggestions recently. Then they made an improvement that made one of the most routine and critical queries run drastically slower.

O brave new world, that has such systems in it!