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Milk Kanban

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Re: Milk Kanban

#121

Post by crazygringo »

UncleEntity wrote: post #61
crazygringo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a relevant analogy. In your example, staying awake during guard duty is your job and it's a proper responsibility. You should be penalized if you fail at your job. I'm saying that tracking milk shouldn't be part of your job, because it's not a good use of people's time. None of it has anything to do with "importance". It's about what is best for the business .

So... how is café latte "best for the business"? Would the business fail if the milk supply ran out?

Are you really asking if an office would suffer if coffee was unavailable?

And you understand that a lot of people don't drink their coffee black?

It seems pretty obvious to me that yes -- having coffee with milk available is very much best for the business. Kind of like having restrooms, chairs, and air conditioning are also best for the business.

Re: Milk Kanban

#122

Post by acyou »

If you carry enough inventory to stock out every 6-12 months, this might a good system. If you stock out every week it might become a pain, both for notification and for reordering.

If it were me, I would have a service handle this, they bring in whatever you want and make sure it's topped up.

Re: Milk Kanban

#123

Post by akoboldfrying »

thorum wrote: post #44
oniony wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then they have to poll the reorder box every day?

Hm, you’re right. I’m thinking a nearby Raspberry Pi with a camera facing the box. It uses an LLM to identify the box contents and send update messages to Kasia each morning. I’m surprised they didn’t think of this already.

Needs more blockchain

Re: Milk Kanban

#124

Post by akoboldfrying »

WJW wrote: post #87
oniony wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then they have to poll the reorder box every day?

Technically that's not really a different problem than exists. With the current system, Kaisa has to poll her desk every day to see if new milk needs to be ordered. Depending on what her activities entail, maybe there are entire days when she's not at her office. Some place has to be polled in any case, but we can choose the best place(s). In an extreme case where there's a 100-floor building with Kaisa's desk on the…

If there is only one fridge, the solution that minimises total distance travelled is trivial: Move Kasia into the fridge.

For n > 1 fridges at known locations, Kasia can be positioned anywhere (including partway along an edge) on an optimal TSP tour through them all.

OTOH, if fridges pop into and out of existence dynamically over time, then having a single Kasia traverse all of them is not feasible. In this case, other employees will need to walk to her desk when they discover the last carton of milk at some fridge. If we can assume that the density of fridge creation/destruction is uniform, then the strategy resulting in minimum total distance travelled in expectation is a spherical office building with Kasia at the centre.

Re: Milk Kanban

#125

Post by y33t »

gwern wrote: post #120
y33t wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've begun to notice the number five a lot. I was reading Tammy Wynette's wiki page the other day and noticed that it appears quite a bit -- born May 5th (5/5), married five times, dead at 55. She also collaborated with the KLF, a pop group from the early 90's which also had an unusual number of fives to do with them (as well as 23's...2+3=5? Oddly, Tammy has a memorial highway in Missippi, MS23). Which brings me bac…

You have discovered the Law of Fives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy#Numer... ; as it is written: > In the Erisian Archives is an old memo from Omar to Mal-2: "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

It goes back at least to Plutarch:

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/misctracts/plutarchE.html

There's speculation that this was derived from an earlier Erisian mystery cult, but how it ended up in a temple of Apollo I'm sure I don't know.

Re: Milk Kanban

#126

Post by greatgib »

carreau wrote: post #71
greatgib wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more efficient and convenient for both in the end. Imagine the burden to have to put a postit on all products, to manage them on your desk, to stack them and remember to count them to reorder. Also because you will not pass your order item by item, like just ordering milk and then sugar 2 days later...

I love how you are not even realising that behind the oatmilk ticket is written "last oatmilk", the behind the half and half one is written "only 3 half and half" behind the foo ticket "foo down to f(frequency of foo use)", and the person now now only need to go through the tickets at the end of the week (or if more than N tickets). I will let you ponder if you need to reticket all, or just the reordered product, wet…

I don't understand how you consider all this complexity to be better than to just have an inventory of what have to be ordered once in a while. In a batch, at the secretary or office manager own time.

Instead of all the things to be managed, the tickets that have to be written, with somehow a kind of brain fuck logic, someone going to this person desk at any interval, might even be interrupting the office manager, the other one having to keep and manage the tickets.

Like when things are ordered, you have to let the post-it in another place like "ordered but not here yet". And maybe the day after things are ordered, another ticket will arrive but sadly the order is already done, so will have to wait for next week anyway...

And think also, like when you are using milk for your coffee, and crap, it is the last drop, so you have to drop everything to bring this stupid ticket to the board or secretary desk.

If it is such a brillant idea, I'm wondering why no one use such a strategy for managing home supplies...

Re: Milk Kanban

#127

Post by greatgib »

jonahx wrote: post #59
greatgib wrote: post #52

The milk example looks very stupid in my opinion. Something more efficient would be something like this: - there is a closet in the kitchen with extra supplies: milk, sugar, ... - Kasia goes in the kitchen once per week to do the inventory of remaining supplies. If items <= 1, then she order new extra items for each low in quantity supplies...

Your proposal probably is an improvement (though there may be some reason it's not feasible in this case -- no closet in the kitchen, etc), but calling the original idea "very stupid" is quite the ungenerous overstatement. It's still clever, still works much better than not having it at all, and is only slightly less efficient that what you're proposing.

If you don't have a closet, it's even easier, everything will be outside in plain sight. So the office manager just need a minute passing by the kitchen to see what would have to be ordered.

In a ideal world where items could be ordered immediately individually, maybe it could have some value, but in that case you might as easily have an app or a shared excel with employees reporting what is running out.

But in a real world, things will be ordered in batch at a specific and fixed frequency time.

Re: Milk Kanban

#128

Post by greatgib »

jonahx wrote: post #59
greatgib wrote: post #52

The milk example looks very stupid in my opinion. Something more efficient would be something like this: - there is a closet in the kitchen with extra supplies: milk, sugar, ... - Kasia goes in the kitchen once per week to do the inventory of remaining supplies. If items <= 1, then she order new extra items for each low in quantity supplies...

Your proposal probably is an improvement (though there may be some reason it's not feasible in this case -- no closet in the kitchen, etc), but calling the original idea "very stupid" is quite the ungenerous overstatement. It's still clever, still works much better than not having it at all, and is only slightly less efficient that what you're proposing.

And I say that it is stupid because from my point of view, you bring a very complex and time costly solution to something that could be solved a lot more simply and efficiently.

Very sadly it is a pattern that we see very commonly in current day software world. Like using Langchain for doing requests to openai, in llm world, and big company hiring expensive consulting firms to tell them what any low level employee in the firm could have told them.

Re: Milk Kanban

#129

Post by gverrilla »

I wouldn't be surprised if milk consumption on that office went down after this. Unless the table was very near, I just wouldn't take the last carton lmao.

Re: Milk Kanban

#130

Post by xtracto »

jimnotgym wrote: post #37

> When people say Kanban, they tend to think of a specific set of practices. Whiteboards & sticky notes (both almost universally virtual). When software developers say Kanban, they tend to think of whiteboards. For anyone who works in manufacturing they would have thought about replenishment first. It is completely ubiquitous anywhere where taking something from a location signals a need for replenishment.These days…

My wife has worked in manufacturing for 20 years. It's very interesting to hear all the "technologies" that they have developed: six sigma, Kanban, lean manufacturing and all that. A lot of of that really feels like REAL engineering. Vs "sprint review" and "retrospective" crap we deal with in software.
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