Root Cause Analysis

I met Asiri when he joined our hardware support team, the same time I had been inducted into the documents clearing software team. There were around 10 engineers in hardware support and were quite busy with the numerous installations we had in the emirates. Most of them were either on a call with a customer, or driving to a customer site or was already at the site. It was not that they were busy all the time, there were days when most of them were seen in the department, carrying out the process documentation or inspecting faulty equipment in the lab by wearing anti-static aprons or even vetting newly arrived equipment spares at the store. We, the payments software team gelled well with them. Both teams, the hardware and software support, used to rush to assist each other whenever required at various sites. Those days in the late 90’s, Dubai was devoid of much traffic and we could cover Bur Dubai and Deira within a matter of few minutes.

There were times or days when most of the incidents would happen due to hardware glitches and while some clients thought it was a software problem, others blamed it on the equipment. On such occasions, our support departments wore a deserted look. I thought of writing this post today to highlight the ways and means used to uncover the root cause by our engineers especially Asiri also referred to as the ‘Doctor’. Asiri used to wear his anti-static apron more than anybody else and that is how the term ‘Doctor’ stuck to him. One more reason was due to his style of functioning whenever he reached the site. He used to sit or stand patiently beside the faulty document processor, maybe touching it all the time and getting valuable feedback from the customer as to what caused it to malfunction. He would appear as a doctor posing many a question to the client to understand the root cause before he even thought of opening or checking the machine.

One day, a bank called him while he was on the way to office in the morning, saying that one of their document processors was rejecting all the cheques/checks instead of processing them. He thought it could be a sensor failure issue and reached the client in 20 minutes. In Deira Dubai, those days, you might take only 10 minutes to reach but you may need another 10 minutes to find parking for your car. By the time he reached the site, the document processor which was acting weird was now back to its normal self and processing them without any issue. Asiri cleaned the sensors at the reading bay and watched the machine for another 15 minutes and finding nothing unusual came back.

The next day more or less at the same time, another Engineer received a similar incident call from the same bank around 11 am and rushed to central operations and by the time he reached, the machine as earlier had shook off its symptoms and was processing the cheques at its standard speed of 250 documents per minute. He also sat for around 15 minutes and finding nothing unusual left the client. The client also joked saying that when you doctors come, the machine doesn’t show any symptoms. This incident, if memory serves me right was not communicated by the second engineer to Asiri the same day.

The third day, Asiri is in office and waiting for any potential incident to happen and perhaps working on one of the defective document processor in the lab when he got a call again for the same issue. Since the client had a backup machine and it was not a peak volume day for the bank, he took some time to get out of the lab. By the time he reached his car, the client called back again saying the machine was working fine now and he need not come.

Asiri walked back from the parking space to the office and that is when he met the second engineer who told him about the call he made the earlier day to the bank and how he had to come back since there was no problem with the machine when he arrived. “So that means today is the third day, the machine is behaving this way” said Asiri and checked the time. All three incidents were pointing to the time around 11 AM.

The next day, as was his usual wont, Asiri did not wait for the customer to call but made himself present at around 10:30 AM at the site. Fakhruddin who was managing the clearing operations at central operations welcomed Asiri by saying “today nothing will happen since you are here”. Asiri smiled and asked for a chair and got seated with his eyes riveted on the reading bay sensor where each speeding cheque on the track is sensed and stopped. He just sat there looking at the sensor, who he rightly thought was the root of the cause while the minutes ticked away. At around 11 AM, he saw the rays of the sun striking the sensor through the venetian blinds of the cabin, and the sensor along with the machine went haywire as the cheques on the track started getting rejected and Fakhruddin had to stop the machine by pressing the pause button. A smiling Asiri pointed out to Fakhruddin the root cause which was the venetian blind slanting position and moved across and closed them completely. On the way out, he told Fakhruddin, “You won’t face this issue anytime soon unless someone plays with the blinds again“.

The Cordless Projector

Some time ago in the late 90’s a new bank being setup in Abu Dhabi was going through a lot of meetings and demos with suppliers for the various systems needed.

I was working with a firm which was a distributor of a leading document processor company. Myself and our sales guy Raheel had started out early morning from Dubai and reached well before our presentation time at the bank’s make shift office. We found to our surprise that our only competitor team had arrived even before us and they looked professional to the core, all dressed in blazer suits and having a couple of laptops rehearsing their presentation.

Here we were with an old desktop computer and an equally old cheque clearing document processor and with no presentation except the demo software which we were supposed to present. We certainly looked out of place when the competitor guys looked at us handling all the hardware and the cables. Raheel asked me to leave all the hardware and rushed out with myself to our regional office which was luckily a couple of buildings away.

We paced into our office with a running request for a computer, where Raheel prepared a quick presentation having 4 or 5 slides, copied onto a 3.5 inch floppy disk. We asked Siddhique, the office assistant to come at around 11 am to pick the hardware and help us load it in our car on our way back.

We raced back to the bank office just in time for our demo. The competitor guys were still working on their presentation, making it slick minute by minute. One of them was walking to and fro and doing a shadow presentation. We said our prayers and hoped to do our best we could in the time we were allotted and entered the meeting room. There was an oval table, a white screen and a projector with around 4 people from the bank’s team eager to watch our presentations. Raheel’s last minute slides were equally important as my demo with the hardware and software. Just as we gave our thanks and came out, we chanced upon Siddhique looking out for us, and asked him to help us take all the hardware and load it into the car.

The document processor modules, the desktop computer, the RS232 serial port and power cables had to be removed and we entrusted that task to Siddhique. On the way back to Dubai after a quick late breakfast, Raheel made a call to the bank’s coordinator just to check how the competitor’s demo had been. The friendly voice at the other end replied,”we had to cancel that demo as your guy who came to take all of your equipment also took our projector’s power cable. I hope it was not done by you guys on purpose”.

The Prized Salesman

I almost fell down onto the floor having dozed off in the early morning. It was going to be another hot day. The room was dark as I was alone within the confines of my space. I must wait for the owner to open the shop to bring in new tidings of the day and watch people amble by.

My job was to sit and make noises to attract people passing by the shop. The eatery shop is located on a busy street in a busy city where people flock to from distant lands in search of a living, a city that was work personified for its working class. The hot summer made things worse for me, as I was supposed to sit outside the shop while people whom I had attracted were cooling their heels inside the restaurant.

People walking fast by the restaurant will not notice it unless I make a hue and cry all of a sudden, that I have to admit, startles some, but that is how I start making my presence felt, so that they look around and notice the eatery joint and a few of the many do enter when they feel they should get some good food. If it was not me sitting outside, very few would have ventured inside or continued walking hungrily.

The only respite I get is during the noon times when sometimes, I am let in and asked to take a siesta when I used to doze of just as I had done now. Inside, I am supposed to keep quiet and just observe or perhaps note down the profile of the customers, so that next time when they passed this way, I should alert them to this hotel which served nice dishes.

It must have been so many seasons that I have been working for my master. I am fed and lodged well as per his vision but then who will not crib when the same stuff is doled out to you day in and day out. You might ask why am I still stuck with him for so long and why am I not looking for better options or leaving this place itself to other lands where there might be better opportunities. But then, I guess, my mission is to seek out new customers for my master.

If only you had known me beforehand, you would have not asked this question. I do not know how many more seasons are in store from me, maybe a few or may be several years ahead as I do not know for how many more I will live or what is, as they call it, my life span. I wish, my voice would remain powerful until the very end.

There are people who pause to look at me as they arrive at this place, for they know, here is one person who sits all day in the morning and into the late evenings just chirping it out to attract many a passerby…

Dubai Perceptions

It was towards the late 90’s when I first set my foot on Dubai sands, thanks to my Uncle who invited me to visit the United Arab Emirates and have a look at job opportunities. This was also one of the primary reasons that brought most Asians towards this city right from the 70’s.

A lot of people have come here and prospered thanks to the enterprising nature of the founders of the emirates who never floundered when it came to trade and adventures. The rulers be it the great Shaikh Zayed or Shaikh Maktoum, always had a pulse on the people’s sentiments and the trade.

My arrival was in June, being one of the hottest months in these parts of the world where I was given a weather shock, just as I left the cool precincts of the airport. I had heard and seen the progress of the Dubai airport since childhood days, as the post cards carried a lot of pictures of the new airport that came up in the 80’s.

The network of roads was mind-boggling in the initial days, and I could not make anything out of the places wherever we went. I stayed at Karama at my uncle’s place, and places like Deira and Bur Dubai took a few days to digest. Also, got to see a few places at Sharjah in the first week, before I decided to hunt for a job.

Mornings were reading the newspapers to look for possible appointments that could match my skills, and call up my uncle at work, so that he could send them by fax, or post to such openings. It appeared that he was running such errands for me more than the work at hand at his office. Email was just catching up in 1997, though computers and the internet had made their appearances in offices. I remain indebted to whatever he did to help me etch out a career in the Gulf.

When I landed a job finally in a few weeks time, it was the public transport that amazed me, by their promptness and by their pickup and delivery of commuters at various work places in neat clock work precision. With just a few coins in your pocket, you could literally travel and cover the whole of the city. Wide foot paths made walking easier, and I would always take the option of walking at least a mile to my office from the bus stop. In summer, however this liberty was taken, only when I missed the bus which would drop me closest to my office, as otherwise, I would be drenched in sweat by the time, I reached in time for work.

Summers are very hot in the middle east but it is best experienced by tourists, visitors and natives alike in the months from June to September, where the dates on palms would ripen with the heat. The humidity was its best in the month of October during the switch over from summer to winter. When one used to leave an air-conditioned cab, you could experience the humid air, that would force you to seek the next cool place. In my case with my spectacles, I would have to take my handkerchief and wipe my lenses, before i could see a thing. It was like getting into a sauna bath. With a few years in the city, it was easy to judge the change of seasons. Rains rarely made their appearance sometimes they did in the winter months especially in the month of December or January, and it was so special that you would miss it if you were indoors and not aware of that lonely shower of rain. With an annual rainfall averaging 2 to 3 centimeters, Dubai was a city that got stuck with its name of the being an Oasis City in a desert. Drinking water came from the springs of Masafi in Fujairah made popular by the Masafi brand or from other springs in other places in the Emirates.

Getting a taxi was easy and you could jump into any make or model of your choice. Most of the taxis were Toyota Corollas and Coronas and Mitsubishi’s. In Deira, armed with a 5 dirham currency note, you could travel anywhere in Deira and take the ferry at Deira to cross over to Bur Dubai and get into another cab or a bus that suited you. The ferry trip would cost you just 50 fils ( 1 Dirham equals 100 Fils) at that time.

Most of the taxi drivers were Asians at that time, mostly from India. Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sometimes people would haggle or bargain with them before getting in after telling them the destination. This way, one could avoid the war of words at the end of the trip, the weather not helping much to the heated arguments in the summer months.

Come 2000, the Dubai Transport made its appearance with the Mercedes make cabs, the Sonata’s followed by the Camry and some of the best makes, and one could get into one’s car of choice, if one had the patience to wait for a while. With this, also came the meter, and one had to cough up more money to pay and slowly the waiting time also got factored into the meter calculations. When the cabs waited for more than 5 minutes, the waiting time started, which was a period of mental agony for the middle class.These cabs offered good comfort, the driver came in a uniform and pleasant manners unlike the earlier cabbies who would size you up, as if your stood in a garment store and he was your worst tailor to befriend.

All said and done, the old cabbies in their corollas and coronas were good natured, barring a few and were the transport messengers of Dubai for long years. By mid 2000, most of them had either joined the branded and newly sprouted car companies like Dubai Transport, Cars and Metro Taxi service or had switched to other professions while some had called it a day and left the land of gold to their own sweet native homes. Many a time during long trips to the other Emirates where work would take me, these drivers used to tell their stories about their loved ones back home.

With the advent of Emaar and Nakheel, the construction boom started, and in all roads, you could see cement mixing trucks plying along signifying the ticking progress. Dubai Airport got a ramp up with Terminal 2 coming up, and the metro got off to a construction phase in 2006.

As Dubai prospered, the savers and lenders of money, the Banks made their appearance with almost all the 7 emirates each having a national bank to its name. In addition to the government banks, there also came to the fore, some private banks from enterprising business houses as also foreign banks like Citi, StanChart, HSBC and Lloyds. The bank street at Bur Dubai and the bank street at Sharjah in the late 90’s got their names from the many banks that stood on either part of the street. As time progressed, slowly banks moved to their private properties at well located places in and around the cities in these emirates.

Dubai was to the asian nationalities, a land of great promise, just as the US was at one time to other nationalities all over the world. There were plenty of jobs in the construction, petroleum and trading industry. Moreover, Dubai was setting up a lot of shopping malls to give company to the lonely Al Ghurair Shopping Center. Slowly you could choose from Burjuman at Bur Dubai and Citi Centre at Deira with a host of major ones coming on Shaikh Zayed. Roundabouts gave way to signals, and the famous Fire roundabout and the fish roundabouts were memories.
The cinema houses that ranged from Dubai to Deira Cinemas as well as the Strand and Al Nasr Leisureland and the Galleria at Hyatt got more company as multiplexes opened in the major shopping complexes that sprung up giving more choice and comfort. With time, some of the old cinema houses were either pulled down or got converted to business complexes.
Hamriya Vegetable and Meat market was well planned, but because of the traffic congestion and difficulty to upscale and being difficult to access, the market got shifted by 2005 to another location near the Al Ain roundabout.

The shopping festival was another attraction for all residents and was a shopping feast that got the approval of all traders who participated in it. With festivals and their raffle draws that evinced a lot of interest at the creek park, people came from far and near to get a glimpse of the various cultural programmes and the fun and fair activities usually associated with exhibition fairs.

GITEX and other exhibitions were well received, and the diary of events started becoming full for a resident to be kept busy after office hours..

By 2005, the new downtown had emerged and the expansion plans filled up both sides of the Shaikh Zayed road with more shopping malls and apartment complexes. Accommodation and business projects expanded up until one could see the gates of Jebel Ali port. Previously a car drive to Abu Dhabi was lonely as one would leave the World Trade Center behind along with a dozen towers on each side.

By becoming a tourist destination on the world map and a trading port, with a couple of free port, internet city and countless hotels, Dubai has finally arrived on the tourist map with a lot of variety for a tourist to choose once he or she lands on the sands of the emirate.

Dubai is vibrant and one can feel the sense of urgency in expansion in the vision of the rulers which is so evident if one just looks at the projects that have come in the period from 2006 to 2013. The trail blazer projects be it the Airport, the Burj Khalifa, the Metro and the umpteen interchanges and construction buzz has made it clear that Dubai is a product of the well laid out planning supported by principles that have a deep-seated foundation and perhaps so because the city and all its inhabitants believe in hard work and progress for all. But for its founders, it is still a work in progress…