Today I fretted about what I was going to do more than a week from now.

The initial reason for my trip was to help another location learn how to manage intracompany orders. Intracompany orders are very tricky; you can do too much with them. For instance, if you order 100 pieces from me, I can confirm that will send you 80 pieces. From then on, all of my system reports and schedules will only show that I owe you 80 pieces. Or I can confirm that I will send you 500 pcs. And then that’s what I owe you; you do not have to approve it.

Now, if the system on your site thinks you need 100 pcs and I  confirm only 80, your system will automatically add a new request for the other 20.  But that gets into another whole bit on how request appear, show due, and automatically adjust both date and quantity, and I am trying to keep this simple. So back to confirming quantities.

The new supervisor in shipping has been confirming only what she currently has on hand to send. I told her she should stop doing that because (notwithstanding what I hinted at above) it was prevent the requesting site from getting what they really wanted.

Then the shipping supervisor had an order which was created for the express purpose of moving the entire quantity of inventory from our site to their site. Between the time the order was placed and when it was ready to ship, a customer sales order had been placed to take one piece. So then I told the supervisor that she should confirm the request for one less piece than it was originally entered for.

Intracompany orders are hard to explain, and the “right” way to do something depends on how you want to manage them. And we are trying to change several parts of the system, too. Trying to envision how I can best explain this to people I have never met before, and also best capitalize on this to get more useful documentation together for all the four or so sites I know of that are affected by this process, took a lot of my imagination and energy. Not to mention lining up the other things I am also supposed to accomplish on this trip.

The entire schedule may have to be re-done, though, because that site I am supposed to help hasn’t actually said which day is good for me to show up and enlighten them. I was kind of waiting for my boss to tell me that. I would have just asked them myself but I am not entirely sure who they are. And the day that I arbitrarily picked to be at that site, other people who are supposed to go with me aren’t available. So I will probably spend tomorrow too fretting about what I am going to do on the week of the 19th.