Mandates and pragmatism

Although it is not possible for me to trace this particular branch of my family tree, our family has always assumed that we have some Taino ancestors. I grew up listening to my Dad tell me the only Taino tale that I know and I often think about it when faced with seemingly impossible situations.  Lately, I have thought about it more.

Since I like to keep food on my table, I have to be careful what I write about. Therefore, for this article, I will share my Dad's tale of a Taino Cacique (chiefstain) and let your imagination do the rest.

Mao, the young Cacique of his Taino tribe and his new wife are expecting their first child any day. Mao is loved by his people and he has brought them prosperity. As it is tradition, Mao and his wife ask the tribe's healer and spiritual leader to visit them prior to the child's arrival.

The healer arrives at Mao's hut and, when crossing the threshold, notices the Cacique's spear above the door.

You see, Mao's father, Atahualpa, had pronounced an edict that every hut must display a simbol of the household's occupation, similar to how the surnames "Hunter" and "Carpenter" came to be in Anglo culture. Mao, being the Cacique, proudly displayed above his door the ceremonial spear as the chief warrior of his tribe.

The healer, however, is not pleased. He begins to chant loudly and drops to his knees crying.

Confused, Mao asks the healer what is wrong.

"Your child will die right here", he says.

"Oh no!" said Mao as his wife runs in to learn the terrible news herself.

Everyone is devastated.

The healer begins to get a better vision and explains to the distraught couple, "just before your son learns to walk, he will be playing by the door and your spear will fall and pierce his head".

The news could not be worse.

Just as the couple begins to accept their awful future, Mao's mother pays a visit.

"What is wrong?", she asks and Mao shares the bad news.

"So the problem is that my grandson will die because that spear will fall and kill him. That spear that is only there because of my late husband's edict?" says the matriarch.

"Yes", responds Mao between sobs.

"Bring down the spear and do away with the edict - it is your own mandate that is creating the problem my son".

Product Identifiers and Catalog Systems

In this article, I will attempt to set up some of the background for a series of articles for an eventual discussion on unique item management.

Part Numbers

The part number system is one of the most misunderstood parts of a system of material identification. It is almost entirely based on best practices, although there are some rules for certain types of material. Perhaps the best article I have seen explaining part numbers is the Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_number, which is a miracle it ever got written so well with exactly zero references.

Example UPC Lookup Results

Universal Product Cataloging Systems

Beyond the wild wild west of the part number system, attempts have been made by industry to standardize product identification. What is interesting is that we are exposed to these every single day. Even if a product has a part number, if it is sold somewhere, it is almost guaranteed to have a universal product number or equivalent code.

One example is the ISBN system used for books and other media. ISBNs are nationally assigned, meaning that each country has an authority that manages them. You can look up an ISBN freely many different ways, such as via http://www.isbnsearch.org/. If you are a developer, there are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) such as Amazon Web Services that allow seamless integration with your application. There are also databases that participate in the open-data initiative, such as the Google Books API (https://developers.google.com/books/docs/v1/using).

The Universal Product Code (UPC) is probably the identifier that we see the most. It is in almost every product we buy. The UPC is assigned by the product manufacturer or designer, although that is not always necessarily the case since any vendor with a vendor code can procure a UPC. It is a catalog identifier at the product level, meaning, for example, that a UPC for a 16 oz. bottle of Nestea Pomegranate Passion Iced Tea would be the same UPC found on every single bottle of the same product, regardless of what store is selling it. The UPC system is managed by an international non-profit organization called GS1. Just like the ISBN, the UPC can be freely searched via many databases such as the following: https://www.barcodelookup.com/.

There is also a system called EAN, which is the European Article Numbering system. The EAN is also managed by GS1 and it is functionally used in an identical way to the UPC.

You might have also heard of GTIN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Trade_Item_Number), which is the Global Trade Item Numbering system. This is an umbrella construct, also managed by GS1, that includes the UPC, EAN, and other variations of universal product catalog identifiers.

There you have it. Just about every product that is sold in stores throughout the world is covered by an ISBN, UPC, EAN, or GTIN, and all those identifiers are publicly and freely searchable.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Product Lookup API

SKUs

Now we get down to the retail level. Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) numbers are routinely confused with other product catalog identifier numbers. The key thing to keep in mind is that SKUs are internal to a supplier and do not mean anything to anyone else other than the entity managing the stock. However, the confusion is so prevalent that many retailers (particularly when interfacing with customers) use SKUs interchangeably as product identifiers. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) API even allows developers to search for SKUs. Amazon being the giant that they are, a SKU search in their API is pretty close to a universal SKU search.


Next article: the Federal Stock Number system.

Intelligent Products

I confess that I like reading research papers. It is an excellent way to stay up to date on the profession and also a good way to understand what is a fashionable trend (i.e. flavor of the day) vs. what is a trend toward progress. I always liked to read copiously, but it wasn't until I started working on a doctoral degree that I learned how to read efficiently in order to achieve a research goal.

When an interesting research topic comes to mind, I usually start by searching for literature in Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/), which many people surprisingly don't know it exists. But I digress.

I have been reading, off and on, for years about unique item management. This goes back to my brief time as a civil service employee in 2007 where I ended up working on a project that would have required individual parts in a submarine to be managed at the item level in order to enable remote management.

The Unique Logistics at  Ikea

At the time, one of the striking things that I found as I was researching the topic of managing items by unique identifier rather than by catalog identifier was how much of the research was coming from Finland and Norway.

It turns out that Scandinavia is a hotbed of logistics innovation for some reason. One of my go-to papers when I need to introduce someone to the possibilities is titled "Intelligent Products: a Survey" (Meyer, Gerben G., Kary Främling, and Jan Holmström. "Intelligent products: A survey." Computers in industry 60.3 (2009): 137-148). I highly recommend it and, if you like it, I also recommend that you follow Holmström's work.

 Back in 2007-2008, when I was working on that project, the idea was thought to be so far out that it wasn't even given the same level of respect as magic and was only discussed in hushed tones in very small groups. So, 8 years later, most of my appliances, and even my doorbell and light bulbs are on the internet. People have actually accepted this technology quite easily, by the way - much more so than the logistics community.

I have a love-hate relationship with research from the Gartner Group, mostly because I usually have to pay for it and I am too cheap. However, many years ago, when working on my Master's thesis, I read a research report titled "Data in its Place" in System Software Architectures Doc. No. R-401-107. It introduced me to the concept of the "Distributed Data Paradox". To put it in my own words, it means that there exists a tug of war between business functionality and technology, as information throughput improves with advances in technology. The paper goes on to suggest that researchers and practitioners need to understand when sufficient technological advancement has taken place to prompt a "reconceptualization" of a business function.

So perhaps this is the right time to consider the idea of unique item management instead of stock keeping unit (SKU) management, particularly in DoD logistics.  It may not fit the bill in every case, but I believe it is worth exploring.