IEEE Potentials Magazine - May/June 2018 - 16
rather than improving efficiency by a few
percentage points, we can offer radical new
processes-perhaps solutions-that can
cut costs in half or more, handle greater
complexity, or offer new products.
employ today or that their competi-
tion use.
In his famous paper, "IT Doesn't
Matter," Nicolas Carr calls IT a "com-
modity." He shows that companies
use the same tools and consultants.
Thus, IT is as electricity, says Carr,
something that one needs but that
does not offer any competitive ad-
vantage. If we offer a standard so-
lution to our customers, using off-
the-shelf software products, Carr
is right. However, if we are able to
think creatively, we may offer some-
thing else, that is, use IT to offer
radical new solutions.
Clearly this is not always easy.
There may be constraints that limit
the freedom we have as consultants
or developers. But there are many
situations where we are allowed to
think creatively. If we use these op-
portunities, we don't only provide
value to the customers, but the de-
velopment job becomes really inter-
esting, perhaps to the degree where
we feel as creative as (other) artists.
The opportunity to offer smart
solutions may come in any type of
application, as long as the following
conditions are present:
■■a good understanding of the cus-
tomer's real problems
■■proficiency with the methods and
tools of the IT profession
■■a willingness to think in new
ways.
A set of cases will show that these
opportunities can offer themselves
in many types of situations. Note
that all of these projects are of the
type that we can expect to meet as
consultants and developers. In our
cases, the customers are quite ordi-
nary companies, and the developers
have been hired to offer traditional
solutions. Still, when we see the
opportunity to offer new and more
radical alternatives, the customers
16
■
May/June 2018
have expressed no problems in rec-
ognizing the advantages and given
us the go-ahead to proceed. The
possibility of getting a leg-up on the
competition is always attractive.
Handling variants
in a furniture company
The customer is a company that
produces furniture for ships. As
space aboard a ship is limited and
expensive, the idea is to adjust the
furniture to the cabin. For example,
if the bunk (bed) is in a corner next
to the bulkhead, no end piece may
be needed. If there is no space for a
200-cm bed, a shorter bed is pro-
duced for this cabin. If a table is
connected to the bed, no legs are
needed at one end (and not on the
other end either, if it is next to a
wardrobe). All pieces have edging,
except on edges that are not seen
(e.g., because the edge is connected
to a wall). Furthermore, the custom-
er is controls the color, length,
width, and types of drawers.
The problem with handling this
flexibility is that it requires many
variants of each piece of furniture.
A bed, a table, or any piece of fur-
niture may exist in a large number
of variants. In the previous system,
the company operated with 40,000
furniture descriptions, each detail-
ing which components went into this
variant. The sheer number of de-
scriptions made it difficult to get an
overview. In many cases, it was easi-
Table 1. an example of a
"goes into" relationship.
PArent
no.
Child
bunk
1
bottom part
top part
bunk
1
bottom part
1
Frame
bottom part
2
Drawers
IEEE PotEntIals
er to develop a new description than
to find the one that was needed. Un-
derstandably, a lot of effort went into
describing furniture variants.
With this number of descriptions,
it became nearly impossible to make
general changes. For example, as-
sembly may become easier if a per-
son cut a half millimeter of traverse
board. But just to find the affected
descriptions and perform the change
would be a major effort.
A better solution would be to spec-
ify more generic or general descrip-
tions. We do this all the time when
we program. For example, a proce-
dure for sorting will take the list to
be sorted, as well as information on
how the procedure should perform
the sort (e.g., ascending), as param-
eters. In this way, the procedure can
be used for any type of sorting. For
programming, this idea has been
extended to offer generic modules or
classes with an interface of param-
eters and a body part that describes
the execution.
However, this is not easy to ac-
hieve for product structures. These
are usually described by specifying
the "goes into" relationships through
data tables (e.g., stating that a bunk
consists of a bottom part and a top
part, that the bottom part consists
of a frame and two drawers, that the
bunk has an end piece at either end,
etc.)-as shown in Table 1. This sim-
ple structure may be augmented by
if-statements, saying that the "goes
into" relationship should be con-
sidered only if the statement is true
(e.g., that the drawers should be in-
cluded only if the customer has se-
lected this option). But this method
does not give enough freedom to ex-
press all variants.
We need a much more f lexible
approach. Based on previous re-
search, we were able to offer a new
solution to the customer: to de-
scribe products as programs by ap-
plying the idea of generic classes.
That is, every piece of furniture has
a list of attributes that describe the
variants as well as a program part
that can be executed to present the
parts that are needed for the par-
ticular variant.
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