What was the secret behind Toyota’s rise from a family run loom manufacturer to one of the world’s biggest and best auto brands? Some even claim it has been the best brand of all. Whatever the ranking may be, Toyota managed to rise from a negligible market participant to aRead More →
Finally, I have retired the old, Ghost based website, which was available until this morning. The decision to move away was primarily triggered by the fact that I could not find an easy way to build a bi-lingual website. All content has been moved and new posts will be publishedRead More →
Crises separate the wheat from the chaff, so they say. Not knowing one’s own situation carries risk. The narrower the operational environment, the higher the risk. When cost pressure rises, it is an instinctive reaction to analyse cost and start savings programmes. Adding urgency and unreliable information significantly raises theRead More →
A picture speaks a thousand words. In times of Corona and the incessant media coverage of the subject, I thought it might be interesting to analyse the data myself. I used the data provided by John Hopkins university to create the chart above and a few others. Globally speaking, theRead More →
Software development as it should be: WinSCP! I have been using WinSCP for transferring files for years because it supports a host of protocols. With Secure Copy (scp) it supports my demand for security. Recently, its author shipped version 5.17 with a bug which probably affected only a few users.Read More →
Special challenges need special solutions. Most companies walk a thin line between off-the-shelf software and individual solutions. How this decision is taken depends on many factors, such as the desire or need to optimise, cost and maintenance efforts, to name but a few. A primary principle for such decisions shouldRead More →
Billing systems create invoices from data and ideally send them right away. Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Access are common tools to do the job. Sometimes, parts of the invoice creation process are already automated. Mostly, however, the majority of the work is still done manually because of the need forRead More →
Occasionally, aggregating data into information is a labour intensive, tedious job which takes lots of comparisons, consistency checks, summations etc.. Even the creation of the initial data can be complicated. The good news is, however, that practically all of these process steps can be completely automated: Starting with the extractionRead More →
A picture paints a thousand words! For many people this proverb holds true. Be it bars, lines, 3D graphs, bubble charts or any other type of visualisation, they convey a message from the displayed data at a single glance. What individual form of display is used depends on the informationRead More →
There is usually more information in a given dataset than one would expect. The Austrian Post scandal has demonstrated this impressively and gives a faint idea of what Google is capable of doing, especially given the information grows faster than linear with the amount of data. So having more dataRead More →
