Insights
Technical write-ups and anonymised problem breakdowns, from work that shipped.
Everything here is written from problems that actually occurred, and everything here is anonymised. No client or employer is named, no client data appears, and identifying details are removed rather than disguised. What is kept is the part that transfers to anyone running the same class of system.
Technical articles
Why Your ERP Report Is Fast on Today and Times Out on Month-to-Date
The most common performance complaint in ERP reporting and the most consistently misdiagnosed. Short and long date ranges frequently read different tables, and if the history table has no index on the column you filter, the database reads all of it. Covers how to confirm it in about ten minutes, how to design the index, and what to check before adding one to a vendor schema.
Case studies
A KPI console for people who were reading the operation from memory
Receiving and picker productivity metrics, including purchase price variance and on-time and in-full rates. Most of the work was deciding which rows count as evidence and which are absence of evidence — and keeping cost figures off screens that face a public floor.
The report that worked on Today and timed out on Month
Reported as “the dashboard is slow.” It was one unindexed date column on a table that shipped with the ERP. The diagnosis took minutes; applying the fix safely took the planning.
One label service instead of a label program per label
Several unrelated paths to a printer, each grown separately, layouts drifting apart. Replaced with one service where label sources are rows in a configuration table rather than new programs.
What tends to get written up here
Operational software problems where the request describes the symptom accurately and the cause not at all. “The dashboard is slow” that turns out to be an access path. “We need another label program” that turns out to be a missing abstraction. “We need a report” that turns out to be a disagreement about which rows count.
If you are running into one of these, the case studies show the shape of the work and operations modernization covers the larger engagement they sit inside.
Recognise one of these?
The first conversation is short and costs nothing.