When I first began working, the buzz word was EDI – or electronic data interchange. I was working in purchasing back then and the concept of transferring information – RFQ’s, purchase orders, bills of lading and invoices – “electronically” was a very attractive concept. An RFQ by the way is a request for quotation aka RFP – request for proposal. In order for a vendor to bid on something, they had to first receive an RFQ from us and then respond by the deadline. Typically, the lowest price won the order. The intention was to have the entire process “automated” thereby eliminating the paper. Whatever paper was remaining would be “microfiched” and then shredded.
When the first PC’s were delivered, nobody knew what to do with them. Word processing was done by a rough version of Word Perfect. It took weeks to figure out which function keys did what. Many of the basic commands and instructions were DOS with Windows still not a reality.
Documents were Quipped not faxed. Telexes, even couriers, were still popular for overseas information transfer. FEDEX was still a Yale term paper theory. Businesspeople slowly decided on Apple, despite the stronghold of IBM. I believe my first PC was manufactured by a company called Wang. I still needed my Texas Instruments calculator do percentages. You can buy a little solar calculator for $l now, back then Bowmar sold one for $150.
Time marched on. There was the AS-400. The PC’s became faster and more powerful. You didn’t need a calculator anymore – you could do math on your cell phone. Steve Jobs lost his job to a Pepsi guy and IBM shut down its PC operations in Boca Raton FL. My old Sinclair became a Packard something, Wang disappeared and Commodore arrived. More and more businesses became “computerized.” Customer service – real customer service – began to disappear and “out-sourcing” sprouted its evil head.
Traffic became shipping and receiving, which then became distribution, which became logistics, which ended up as supply chain management. Different terms for the same thing. More and more offices got PC’s and “networking” was all the rage. Still no internet. Nobody knew how to get on-line to anything with or without a dial up modem. AS-400's got smaller and more powerful. Encyclopedia salesman started to look for new careers.
But something not so expected was happening. All that paper that we wanted to eliminate didn’t go away. In fact, it grew in numbers. There were more reports, more printouts and back-ups of everything being stored in the computers. Nobody felt quite comfortable without their paper. For every new PC, there was another desk next to it with computer paper and binders of unnecessary information. Boxes and boxes of it. The paper business, forecast to go into steep decline, actually was booming.
Before computers, a truck would wait at a shipper for bills of lading and packing lists. After computers, a truck would wait, sometimes longer, at a shipper, for bills of lading and packing lists. If the “system” was “down”, the wait was even longer – longer than at any time when their were no computers. The same held true at consignees. The more computers we bought, the more paper there was.
Enter the computer “enhancements” – like the bar code and its friend the scanner. It took years to perfect the systems. It was supposed to be a revolution to inventory management. We’re still waiting. An order of material to be loaded on a truck, all scanned into the system, can still be incorrect when it reaches its destination. And guess what – all those bar codes and scanners produced something unexpected – more paper.
So now were have Windows – the ultimate in user friendliness. There are i-Everything’s. There is QC – Qualcomm, satellite tracking, scanning, fast this and rapid that, PC’s, laptops and oh yes, smartphones. But no less paper. Besides the actual loading and unloading, a truck driver still spends an inordinate and unnecessary amount of time waiting on paperwork. All that computer power has simply resulted in a more efficient way to generate more paper, thus completely defeating its original purpose – to go paperless.
I need to print a copy of this out to show my wife. Be safe out there.
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