Re: AS adoption barriers (starter kit)
Re: AS adoption barriers (starter kit)
- Subject: Re: AS adoption barriers (starter kit)
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 10:28:10 -0300
At 1:22 PM +0100 05/10/01, has wrote:
Bill Briggs wrote:
>At 3:45 PM -0600 03/10/01, email@hidden wrote:
But do you know how difficult it is to get someone at ABC Printing
Company to let you in the front door to show them what can be done
with AppleScript?
Sure do. And it's very difficult to understand.
It's a shame, sure, but I can kinda appreciate why folks might not want to
know...
First off, I think the industry is quite conservative in nature anyway.
Mistakes and downtime can be very expensive indeed, so once they've got a
process that works they'll be equally reluctant to change it. Ask your
printer chap sometime to tell you a few tales of what happens when Things
Go Wrong.
Well, since the computers are already "doing the work" even if the
execution is done manually by someone at the keyboard, there's not a
lot that could go wrong with the scripts that couldn't also go wrong
with the manual approach. In fact, in the last workflow automation I
installed a week ago there would be a MUCH greater chance of errors
being made if it was done manually. In fact, in the day and a half it
takes to do one "cycle" of their process if one does it manually, I
highly doubt that someone would do it error free, or at least they
wouldn't all the time. The scripts, because they don't get
distracted, or misread things, or don't get bored with the repetitive
nature of the task, don't make mistakes like people do.
In that shop I mentioned in the first post, one of the things that
used to happen was that when one of the Macs in the process crashed,
someone would have to go to the main server on which all of the
controlling scripts are kept, and then sort things out and restart
the process from where it got stuck. We wrote a new "sentry" script
for the server that would automate even that process, no matter what
Mac went down, even if it was the server itself! Now when a Mac bails
on a job in mid flight, as soon as it's rebooted the sentry gets the
controlling Mac to remount the disk, check where things were when it
packed it in, clean up any messes, and get the process going again
from the last completed stage. This was a sort of self-healing script
that policed the entire workflow. Worked like a charm.
If one was trying to automate fully manual processes, maybe I'd buy
the argument. But most shops these days are bound to their computers,
and in that case all we're trying to do is let the computer drive
itself instead of having a human operator run it. Of course there
will always be those jobs that require a person, but if there's
drugery that can be relieved, as is so often the case, then it seems
like there's not much risk at all. And the returns are great and
immediate. You get employees freed up to do other work, or you can
bring more work into your shop. It's hard for me to see any downside
of it (other than someone getting fired as a result of the
automation, which so far I haven't seen happen).
- web