At one point in my career I was responsible for the training department of a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. Training is important for any company, but especially one that manufactures drugs that are injected directly into the body. Consequently, we were required by law to maintain records verifying that every employee was trained to do their job according the the approved procedures.

This was at a time when companies were transitioning from paper records to computers, and while we had created a computer tracking system, our official records were still on paper. Corporate management (at another site, in another state and some had concluded in another world) decided my group needed a modern system. We agreed, but instead of asking us what we needed they formed a committee to choose the best system available for us. There were a couple of simple systems that would have done everything we needed and would have been implemented in a week. But, they wanted us to have the best.

The system they chose had originally been developed for a huge company in another industry and I'm sure it worked beautiful for them. It tracked fees for training events, travel expenses, everything you could imagine. However, we almost never sent people to off site training events. We trained individuals on specific tasks on the production floor, and the system didn't track that. It took us a full year to implement this wonderful system because we had to change everything about how we did training. I promised myself I would never make people change business processes that worked, just to make them work with a computer system. When I created the TriplePoint Advantage^TM I remembered that promise.