Delivering Coffee
Nigel Hamer modelled how IT delivers solutions to the business by looking how staff at a coffee cart dealt with customers. What interests me is how its delivered. The process.
Synchronous and Asynchronous Processing
The process of getting a coffee is something like this:
- take order
- take payment
- make espresso
- pour milk and espresso
- hand over coffee
As I queue at the coffee cart fairly frequently, I started to notice that they had various ways of working. The two key ways were:
- Asynchronous: Each person has a specific task (eg till, making espresso, heating milk, pouring coffee) and they communicated the order (asynchronously) using till receipts and writing "D" on the cup for decaf. The receipt and cups are Kanban in the Toyota Production System.
- Synchronous: Each member of staff is responsible for a given order; they take order, then the payment , then make the coffee and then hand it to their customer.
There are various pros and cons of these methods. In the first, you are relying on the process and the communication mechanism, or "Kanban", to ensure that an order is fulfilled. If something goes AWOL, then the only way that they get notified of the problem is via the customer, and the person pouring the coffee won't have knowledge of what should have happened. However, as the process rarely goes wrong, sorting these problems out only take a very small overhead. At the coffee cart, if something goes wrong there is usually a degree of confusion, so you should have a well defined exceptions procedure, and a way to communicate the problem back up the process.
Using the second approach, you get somebody taking care of your order, so the scope for something to go wrong is reduced, and the resolution path is easier, as the customer refuses to take the coffee, and the member of staff dealing with that order can resolve the problem. However, the individual tasks will be less efficient, as there's nobody ensuring that there's always hot milk and espresso available, and the lead times of each may impact the delivery time of a particular order.
Choosing the right process is down to your requirements. If the asynchronous approach gives you a satisfactory success rate, even though there is no guarantee that each person gets the right coffee, if it works 99.9% of the time, it is far more efficient and gives quicker service. If you want to be very sure that each customer gets better individual attention, and a higher probability that they get the right order, and don't mind slower service as a result, then you choose the second.
The decision-making process normally seems to work the other way in the real world. People assume that 99.9% success, even with an exceptions process, isn't good enough, and happily take the hit on efficiency to get this percieved guarantee of successful delivery.
I would suggest that the first process, when applied to computer systems, will usually provide the best solution, with a perfectly good success rate.
