Flow production

A couple of years ago I have heard about flow chemistry which my revolutionize chemical production. Instead of doing production in batches as in the traditional method, production is done in a system of tubes where material is permanently added or removed, so production really "flows".

   That sounds somewhat familiar; data processing once was done in batches, then with on-line transaction processing and high performance databases new data was added and processed with minimal latency. The first wave of Internet stepped back to batch processing with pages updated manually and search indexes constructed in the background and with delay. Then modern content management systems have been introduced, and search engines started to employ instant indexing.  

  Probably Big Data is the next frontier. Data analysis and business intelligence are tedious tasks,  but now the promise is that computers will be able to process and analyze huge amount of information in a matter of milliseconds, which makes applications possible which couldn't be imagined before.

  There are still a lot of batch applications and I'm sure they are making a good job. However I would suggest to evaluate them, for a good reason: In general time is money so if you can make something faster it will perform better too. In addition in instant processing there is no room for manual intervention or ad-hoc solutions (as it's often the case). That is there is less opportunity for errors and people are forced to clear processes and concentrate on adding value rather just keep things running.  Instant processing also will make problems surface faster.

  Flow production is not limited for software, all kind of production should work int this way. No wonder that Toyota talks about flow in production, and if you see the car industry in the recent decades they have learned how to produce car with very low level of inventory and in thousands of variants, changing options all the way during production. I'm sure that the number of models an automaker offers will further increase and customers will be able to receive their cars days or hours after specification. Remember, once all cars were produced uniquely.

  Where I miss flow production the most is reporting. In the corporate word reports are often produced with a lot of manual effort, and slowly. Why a standard and flexible reporting system can't be built up, where customers (i.e. management and shareholders) can select the preferred option and get instant reports? But it's not much different at every place where there is administration.