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Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

ns.nl

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Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#211

Post by AdrianB1 »

xyst wrote: post #83
quartz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the notice: > It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. ...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole. I don't know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands' timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew sched…

I have seen “SAP” tossed around in this industry and still have no clue what they do to earn money. Are they the equivalence of “salesforce”?

SAP is mainly an ERP system, but it has various modules dealing with stuff from Purchase Orders and Materials Management to HR. It can be very large and extremely expensive, like over $1 billion for one company in ~ 20 years. It can be customized in many ways, good consultants are very expensive and the cheap ones are usually a waste of money. Without customization very few companies can map their processes on out of the box SAP.

It was developed a very long time ago, it has a huge adoption in large companies and a few years ago when they migrated from R3 to Hana one of their own people told us in an architecture review meeting that they have over 300,000 built in reports to migrate.

In many cases companies are adopting SAP because "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". Anecdotical, the company where my brother works is implementing SAP and changed all existing networking gear with Cisco because "this is what big companies do". They threw away brand new equipment and spent several millions on the SAP implementation that is still not working, forecasting they will pay even more millions to make it work then millions per year to use it.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#212

Post by coolgoose »

j0e1 wrote: post #148

What jumps out at me after reading this notice is how it completely lacks any apology. I am not prescribing what it should say but merely observing that having lived in North America for sometime now, it seems hard for me to imagine for such a notice to not sound profusely apologetic here. Note: I do not consider words like 'unfortunately' and 'extremely unpleasant' apologetic. Also, I understand there are cultural d…

I don't mind the tone, I got tired of US style politically correctness just for the sake of saying it.

How would "We are trully sorry for this incident" make it any better ?

I do mind the fact that they don't pay the people their money back if they try to find alternatives to get to their destination. That's 100% unacceptable.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#213

Post by rgj »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #185
rgj wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel. Those are pretty standard terms here in .NL. 36 hours is considered fulltime by most employers, including government and semi-government. Pension is offered almost everywhere and at least 4 weeks vacation is the legal…

>36 hours is considered fulltime by most employers How standard is that in the private sector or non former state owned enterprises? I haven't looked at the NL market in a while but most tech jobs I saw back then were 40h/week.

It's hard to find actual numbers. Tech jobs, smaller companies ("MKB") and work in the agricultural sector tend to have a higher percentage of 40 hour work weeks than other sectors.

Only 3% of the people in the Netherlands work 41 hours per week or more. The average Dutchman works 31 hours per week. (source https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/08/meer-dan-de-helft-we...)

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#214

Post by valvar »

Saser wrote: post #113
Agentlien wrote: post #110

This reminds me of the story one of my university teachers used to introduce himself. He was the most brilliant educator I've had, really passionate about making sure people could actually follow and so humble. The course was called "Digital and Computer Technology" and it was a first year course teaching you to build a CPU starting from logic gates and then program it with assembly. He said that when he had recently…

Rolf Snedsböl? :-) Agreed that he was one of the best educators (if not _the_ best) I had

An absolute legend! My favourite of his jokes: "when I moved to Sweden from Norway, the average IQ went up in both countries".

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#215

Post by shankr »

coolgoose wrote: post #212
j0e1 wrote: post #148

What jumps out at me after reading this notice is how it completely lacks any apology. I am not prescribing what it should say but merely observing that having lived in North America for sometime now, it seems hard for me to imagine for such a notice to not sound profusely apologetic here. Note: I do not consider words like 'unfortunately' and 'extremely unpleasant' apologetic. Also, I understand there are cultural d…

I don't mind the tone, I got tired of US style politically correctness just for the sake of saying it. How would "We are trully sorry for this incident" make it any better ? I do mind the fact that they don't pay the people their money back if they try to find alternatives to get to their destination. That's 100% unacceptable.

When is being apologetic became politically correctness? Are we soon going to call every decent human like behavior in public space as being politically correct?

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#216

Post by sideshowb »

Freak_NL wrote: post #175
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m puzzled by the lack of resilience in retail sales. I thought “always be closing” was supposed to apply to all types of sales. A receipt pad and a credit card imprinter under the counter would be a very cheap backup. It would be slow, but at least they would be closing. It can even be considered a national security issue in the case of food, medicines and other vital services.

This is Europe. Credit card imprinters are rare if they were ever used at all. I've never seen one. The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a…

We did have them in the 1990s. But my most recent debit card is no longer embossed

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#217

Post by PennRobotics »

ArnoVW wrote: post #173
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I'd say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them. I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf "enterprise" software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to cu…

Have done consulting for 15 years, understand your feelings. But I'd like to offer some alternative viewpoints. Buying an off the shelve package also buys you an industry-standard business process. The idea is that part of value comes from the process that you have to shoe-horn into. Some integration is expected (and provided for) but if you have to modify heavily, You're Not Using It Correctly. Also, using an OTS pa…

You see, when your Foxpro guy retires in 10 years, either you've been training your new hires how to program Foxpro (a waste of time) or you'll pay a specialist to move all your business data and operation macros to a new platform (a waste of money).

SAP lets you stop kicking that can down the road by wasting your time and money today.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#218

Post by unnah »

tazjin wrote: post #186
Freak_NL wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Europe. Credit card imprinters are rare if they were ever used at all. I've never seen one. The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a…

Most credit or debit cards support offline transactions, so a shop can keep a battery powered terminal that reconciles when it comes online. Imprinters don't exist in Europe to my knowledge - the first time I saw one was on a visit to NYC a few years ago and I thought they were pranking me.

There are a lot of different cultural practices in Europe, and unification is a slow process. I for one have seen many imprinters in use in Europe, although it has been years since I last saw one. An online terminal used to be significantly more expensive than an imprinter, so small shops would prefer the imprinter, especially in rural locations with bad connectivity.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#219

Post by tromp »

gsliepen wrote: post #143
vanderZwan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was "deem" "impossible" for a human to calculate I live in Malmö so you have to understand I'm obliged to make a "well no wonder given the Danish counting system" joke here > Fifty is halvtreds, which stands for halvtredje-sinds-tyve, meaning “third half times twenty”, or “two scores plus half of the third score” [2½ 20]* https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-danish/e...

Indeed it is a very weird way of counting. It was a question on Code Golf a few years ago: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/92657/count-to-... What is remarkable here is that usually there are a lot of answers in dedicated golfing languages that can solve seemingly very complex tasks in just a few tens of bytes, here there is only one such answer, and it takes 115 bytes. So perhaps one could say it's even…

That is not 115 bytes, but 115 wide (16-bit) characters, or 230 bytes.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#220

Post by Maken »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #187
Freak_NL wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Europe. Credit card imprinters are rare if they were ever used at all. I've never seen one. The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a…

I'm in Europe too, and I have never seen an imprinter either, but I keep being issued cards with embossed numbers, so I figure they must be good for something, if not imprinting, what else? I'm concerned about the phasing out of cash too as a separate issue, I just don't think the cashless options should have to be subject to artificial limitations like requiring electricity or a network connection to be able to be u…

My lastest debit card (issued last year) was the first one I got without embossed numbers. I guess retrocompatibility is no longer a priority. Not that it changes anything for me, virtually every shop has already phased out even the magstripes and use either chip cards or NFCs.
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