Moving countries is an experience

So my stuff arrived on Friday. It is great sleeping on your own bed. It’s been sailing on a ship for the last two months. So the weekend was spent un-wrapping and un-packing.

It’s amazing what things your collect over your life, I found a collection of processors that I was once going to mount on a board to hang on the wall as art, huh. The collection ranged from a 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro and there 11 in total. These little gems popped up as different boxes got opened. I found a large bag of old SIMMS and DIMMS. I think the bag weighed about 1.5 kg. I really don’t know why I am keeping these. I also seem to have one of my first PCs dismantled in different boxes. I was thinking at some point that I’d keep some old computer stuff to show my kids when we have a family. I think I am really keeping them for myself to reminisce.

I finally decided that I should get rid of my SQL6.5, I kept my SQL7.0 and SQL2000 books until my next house move. SQL2005 is on its way so I’ll have to make room for those books. The Office95 developer stuff went, but I kept my Access 2.0, 95, 2000 and XP books, I spent a lot of time writing Access databases and applications so I’m fond of keeping these for a while. Also various versions of development tools like Visual C++ 1.5, Visual Studio and early MSDN Subscriptions. Found a few old games I loved playing, Diablo was a great time waster.

So it got to Sunday and my wife had worked out that we don’t have enough cupboard space in the new flat for her cloths. Places in London are a fair bit smaller than what you find in Sydney. So we decided to venture down to the local, self assemble furniture warehouse to get a new chest of drawers. Traffic was bad it took us almost an hour and a half to get there. This place is massive, it has its own restaurant. So because it took so long to get there we had to eat. We line up, get our tray, order our food, feel suitably happy that we have eaten and are ready to tackle the showroom.

We start to wander around, there are some great ideas at this place, so you start to think if you had this and that, you could do this and that at home. We came across something that we liked, wrote the number down and noted that it was a self service item so we had to get it ourselves. We continued to meander through the displays for another few hours, it is an absolutely huge place.

We get to the end of the displays we have had enough so go and get our stuff. We venture into the self service section, which is a massive warehouse. The racking is six pallets high and of course they don’t let the customers drive forklifts. Just imagine if they did, most regular shoppers, like me, have trouble handling a shopping kart. Getting let loose to get your own pallet down from the fifth highest pallet bay would be fun.

We have to find the floor level picking location for our stuff, looking for the aisle 8, 9, 10. Ok now find the pallet location. 46, 47, hmm no 48. I wait there for my wife to go and ask, she comes back and has been informed that the item is in the next warehouse aisle 50. Off we go. So we find our box and get it on the trolley. Lets go.

I’ve been working around warehouses and warehousing software for a while now and so while I’m lining up to pay, I’m thinking of the supply chain that this store has setup. They are the distributor and retailer at the same time and the customers are the warehouse picking staff. It’s really taking the costs out of the supply chain because the customer is doing it themselves. The distributor only has to have staff to run the replenishment runs to refill the customer picking locations. Think of the inventory flow from the manufacturers, to end customer. You could build this supply chain with MBS as the core. For example with the warehousing functionality in Axapta as it has all the flexibility and functionality to build on.

This stuff is cheap, ok off now to assemble our new drawers, hmmm.

Cheers

LC

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