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Product suggestion for daily conversations with China Facility

TwiceOver

TwiceOver

Lifer
Mods, please move to the appropriate forum.

Currently we have a partner facility in China. Our operations department has put together a document that they send back and forth which has the basic daily happenings, new orders, urgent issues, blah blah. THis is a word document and to keep it small is filled with various acronyms and abbreviations that nobody understands.

Every day multiple staff reads this document for updates on their questions. Unfortunately for new staff and even for myself it is hard to understand, not sortable, and just a mess in my opinion.

I've been tasked with coming up with a replacement. My initial thought is to create a user forum, but was wondering if anyone has any other suggestions. A Word doc just isn't cutting it. This contains order information (Push Out/Pull In), Quality Issues, general chatter. Worst of all, when a subject is finished it is just deleted, there goes history.

Anyway, hope my request is clear enough, probably not.
 
We use Google Docs for this kind of thing. It lets our West Coast team update and add info while us East Coasters are off.
 
If you're going to make a form, check out InfoPath. If you want a form that will store entries, MS Access is pretty easy.
 
By the way, you have a grammatical issue in your signature. Boss' is wrong. Boss's is how it should be written and pronounced. A word that ends in s still needs an apostrophe followed by an s to show singular possession.
 
An excel log with data validation and drop-downs would be a big step up and pretty easy to implement.
 
Dman8777 said:
Email?
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Doesn't really work that way. That would be 400 emails compared to 1 word doc. Visibility lost to parties that need to read and reply. Forget to copy someone and we lose a day.

rudeguy said:
We use Google Docs for this kind of thing. It lets our West Coast team update and add info while us East Coasters are off.
Click to expand...
Google Docs is HORRIBLE in china.

MrDudeMan said:
The obvious answer... you don't need to solve this problem. It was solved many, many years ago.
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Again, email won't work.
 
TwiceOver said:
Doesn't really work that way. That would be 400 emails compared to 1 word doc. Visibility lost to parties that need to read and reply. Forget to copy someone and we lose a day.


Google Docs is HORRIBLE in china.



Again, email won't work.
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Email. The problem you described is solved via email in massive corporations all over the planet.

If you can't miss anyone, then put the entire company on a mailing list with the daily happenings, urgent issues, etc. Pretty much anything else will put the information out of reach for the many who are too lazy to go research it on your new website, form, or whatever else you create.

You should seriously reconsider your approach to this set of problems. Maybe there are multiple problems that can't all be solved via email, but it sounds like it absolutely needs to be used more effectively. Between history and threading, your communication would improve dramatically. Part of your email solution should also be mandatory filters, forwards, rules, etc. That's how it works at my company and there's never an issue. To solve the acronym problem, there's a wiki.
 
MrDudeMan said:
Email. The problem you described is solved via email in massive corporations all over the planet.

If you can't miss anyone, then put the entire company on a mailing list with the daily happenings, urgent issues, etc. Pretty much anything else will put the information out of reach for the many who are too lazy to go research it on your new website, form, or whatever else you create.

You should seriously reconsider your approach to this set of problems. Maybe there are multiple problems that can't all be solved via email, but it sounds like it absolutely needs to be used more effectively. Between history and threading, your communication would improve dramatically. Part of your email solution should also be mandatory filters, forwards, rules, etc. That's how it works at my company and there's never an issue. To solve the acronym problem, there's a wiki.
Click to expand...

I wish I could expose some of the document to you. Email will not work.
 
I would use something like Bugzilla or Mantis. Treat the issues like software bugs. Create issues which are categorized by your custom demands (order, suggestion, production problem, whatever) and priority. Issues can be viewed and worked on by multiple people which you can classify into groups. When closed you can always go back to review them. You can create reports on them. Super organized.
 
How's Jira in China? Sounds like you need tickets, for orders and for bugs, as well as "general chatter". Jira can be locally or remotely hosted.
 
Excel Action List. If implemented properly, you can categorize using columns and then filter as needed to only view the info that you need. The entire document can be write protected, or only certain cells. You can limit cell selections to a predefined answer (Yes/No/TBD).

Reviewing becomes easier since you say "Let's start with Engineering's task first." That way, all of the required people call in for the first part of the meeting. "At 30 mins past, we'll cover Operations". That way Operations doesn't need to call in until 30 mins in and you don;t tie up a lot of valuable resources listening to drivel that has nothing to do with them.

Special software isn't required (other than Excel or a variant that can open Excel files) and it can be stored on a central server or emailed.

You're trying to over complicate it. Spend a couple of hours coming up with an Excel file and see what happens.

Example:

Action | Department | Owner | Due Date | Cost | Comments
 
skimple said:
Excel Action List. If implemented properly, you can categorize using columns and then filter as needed to only view the info that you need. The entire document can be write protected, or only certain cells. You can limit cell selections to a predefined answer (Yes/No/TBD).

Reviewing becomes easier since you say "Let's start with Engineering's task first." That way, all of the required people call in for the first part of the meeting. "At 30 mins past, we'll cover Operations". That way Operations doesn't need to call in until 30 mins in and you don;t tie up a lot of valuable resources listening to drivel that has nothing to do with them.

Special software isn't required (other than Excel or a variant that can open Excel files) and it can be stored on a central server or emailed.

You're trying to over complicate it. Spend a couple of hours coming up with an Excel file and see what happens.

Example:

Action | Department | Owner | Due Date | Cost | Comments
Click to expand...

Yeah, this document actually started as an Excel document. The subject matter is not always text, could be an attached document or table data. Plus all of the interaction text and replies.

Also, there is no accompanying call, this IS the call.
 
Ken g6 said:
How's Jira in China? Sounds like you need tickets, for orders and for bugs, as well as "general chatter". Jira can be locally or remotely hosted.
Click to expand...

Interesting product. Would want to see how the conversation can happen in it. That's pretty much how I view the document, a trouble ticket system, replies, closed.
 
TwiceOver said:
Coming from a system that costs $0 and is still working. Yes.

I'm sure it's a great product.
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If it's working, then why are you spending time and effort trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist? You wouldn't have created this post if your current solution was sufficient, i.e. working.

You missed the point. A company that's running an international operation gawking at $150/month is absolutely insane. Your time being essentially wasted on this when the solution may be as cheap as a few hundreds dollars is reason enough to fire whoever made that decision in my book. The time you've spent so far and the time you will spend in the future to develop something that will surely be less functional and less robust than a productized solution is so inefficient and horrible that I don't really know what to say. You are most definitely not going to develop something better than any (all?) of the suggestions in this thread that have thousands of man hours poured into their development.
 
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