{"id":61,"date":"2007-11-07T11:19:30","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T11:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/?p=61"},"modified":"2009-05-11T14:34:43","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T14:34:43","slug":"more-numeracy-woes-bad-news-for-supply-chain-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/more-numeracy-woes-bad-news-for-supply-chain-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"More numeracy woes, bad news for supply chain skills"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot<\/a> have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The customers’ confusion stems from the concept of this scratchcard, as the Manchester Evening News<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Players, apparently, had trouble comparing two negative numbers and deciding which was the higher.<\/p>\n

Do read the MEN article, as it is very funny, if rather depressing. I wrote only last month about how poor numeracy threatens the success of Six Sigma<\/a>. But failure at this level of simple arithmetical ability would make even the “keep it simple” improvement activities employed in Lean quite hard. I don’t want to get too down about this, because people can still come up with error-proofing ideas, etc without being able to work out that minus six is not less than minus eight.<\/p>\n

But would we get better, faster results if our workforce had better basic skills? Undoubtedly.<\/p>\n

Links<\/h2>\n

Manchester Evening News ‘Cool Cash’ card confusion<\/em>: http:\/\/www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk\/news\/s\/1022757_cool_cash_card_confusion<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won. The customers’ confusion stems from the concept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[81,11,80,24,9,40],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222,"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.supplychainview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}