This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.
This time it is my former Gartner colleague, Helmuth Guembel, who now runs Strategy Partners International. Here he talks about his home improvement project in Switzerland, and the global supply chain it has involved
“I have analyzed the software industry for decades now. And I have watched with admiration how “follow the sun” techniques have matured to coordinate global software development in US, Europe, India and other parts of the world. So, when it came to a home improvement project, I said – why not apply those some principles? The architect, Romedi Castellani's estimate to use Swiss labor and materials made the decision easier. As you may know Switzerland has one of the highest cost of living in the world.
But as with software projects, we had “scope creep”. We started with the need to fix the decrepit in-door pool building. It was an all aluminum structure that had proven to be too weak to withstand the extreme snow loads Swiss alpine winters can bring. Then we decided to use the opportunity to add substantially to the square footage. Thus, a generous home office, a room for our daughter, a library, 2 bathrooms and a bedroom were added to the design.
We are still at it four years later – yes, it has become my hobby :)
Technology, including 500 pieces of emails used during the project, helped at every step of the way.
The Planning and Design
Having traveled extensively in Asia we knew what luxury hotels and villas are like these days. We had brought many books about these dream places and showed them to our architect. He was fascinated, but being a young man, we had to compensate for the fact that he has not seen much of the world yet.
After some research and a few trips to Bali and India, we decided to source extensively from these two areas.
We got from Bali:
- 200 sq ft of marble flooring
- all the wood flooring (massive teak)
- all the doors (teak, hand carved)
- all the furniture (custom designs for the most part)
- many of the light fixtures
- all the marble basins for the bathrooms
From India:
- 5 wooden ebony pillars – each 500 pound in weight
– other materials from homes in state of disrepair
(All of this came from Cochin in South India, an excellent source for those who are interested in such materials.)
I used a version of Autocad that the specialist store, Hettich distributes to craftsmen to design furniture. Once I had learnt how to use the software, and used the their on-line catalog, I could design a cabinet in 10 minutes and create all the necessary drawings as in one on the right
The Construction
My “joiner” (a trade term for wood craftsmen), Jaleel in Bali had e-mail, but no Autocad. So I converted all the drawings into PDFs. The hardware I specified, however, did not mean a thing to the good man – he had never seen such stuff and had no idea where to get it from.
Hettich has an office in Jakarta, but does not carry the product line I needed in Indonesia. Their VP of International Business Development offered to ship the goods directly from his Singapore hub to the joiner – a generous offer given the fact that my needs were really chicken feed compared to the lot sizes they are used. His payback was in better understanding the Bali market, where a lot of furniture is made for Australia.
We forgot completely that Indonesia is not that open a trade economy and the joiner, of course, had no import license for the hardware. So the hinges got stuck in customs for more than 3 months and I had to transfer additional money to get them out. Don’t ask me for an audit trail for that. I do not have access to any Governance, Risk and Compliance software and I suspect it would not translate into Bahasa :)
At home, our young architect, bless his heart, added to initial project challenges. He had overlooked that with more recent legislation cause the pool new structure was 2 feet too close to the neighboring plot. Since the geometry was dictated by the pre-existing pool dugout, we had to find a compromise which we negotiated with our neighbor.
It ultimately meant that there was a small strip on the east side of the pool that was inaccessible. Here we have to credit our architect with creativity. How about a bridge across the pool? Having just returned from Cambodia, we had seen many bridges near temples – all with naga handrails- and we wanted one of those. The joiner who had by finished working on our hinges offered to make that bridge and submitted a superb design .
He did not provide detailed specs though – just assured us it would span the pool. Well, you can imagine what came next!
On our next trip to Bali, we got to see it and we were overwhelmed by its size. It was significantly higher and wider than we had expected. The joiner defended his design – he insisted that anything smaller would not have worked. He loves massive teak and the piece, indeed, is a masterpiece when it comes to size!
The Logistics
In the course of time, no fewer than 7 containers totaling over 420000 pounds in weight were shipped from the other side of the world. I got most of the logistics papers in PDF-format by email. But customs authorities and forwarding authorities still require paper documents that had to be delivered via courier. My Bali freight forwarding company, Sapta Prima, did the trucking of very skillfully packed containers to Surabaya, where the containers were loaded on a ship.
From then on I could track the load all the way to Hamburg using a free and very useful in web service, called Vesseltracker that is an extension to Google Earth. This allowed me to synchronize the arrival of the container with the last leg of the transport, a combination of track (to Salzburg) and then by road, to my town, Scuol. The largest container, 40ft high, was skillfully delivered by a young lady trucker, Sabine, who did a great job driving her large Scania truck through our narrow roads.
All in all, this was a very challenging project that yielded quite unusual results blending European construction methods with Asian style and craftsmanship. The impressive thing the trade specialists were not required to travel. Sure, this is not something for everybody – it requires a solid amount of determination, skill, and, above all, endless patience and improvisation. But to us, it certainly was worth the while and all of the efforts.
And I have new found respect for those who manage global software development with teams around the world.”
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April 20, 2009 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)