Pinheads: Numbers? What Numbers?

31 Jan

Why did you put numbers on the stickers?

inventorysticker

Did you ever work for a company that did not excel at keeping track of it’s capital equipment? Well, at this company all equipment was carefully tagged with an easily removable sticker and filed in an MS Access database accessible only one one person’s computer. Brilliant.

Equipment (in this case computers and peripherals) often changed hands and was even scrapped without any procedure for tracking the new owner, location or disposition of the equipment: the brilliance continues.

As you can imagine we had literally thousands of bits of computer stuff not accounted for. So a new boss decided that it was time to inventory all the computer equipment. Something that any bean-counter will tell you is A Good Thing. Heck even I would agree to that.

So the new boss puts the boss in question in charge of developing a Project Plan for this undertaking and to solicit bids to get someone to do the inventory.

We end up with a company that used college kids.

As it often happens, the scope of the plan changed. It went from simple inventory to patching the operating system (Mostly NT4, 95 and 98) and virus checker on about 1500 computers. Can you say recipe for disaster?

It gets better. The boss does her usual brilliant job by putting together a check sheet in MS Excel (a 15 minute job) and then dumps the rest of the work the work on an intern. Then she is off on her usual two hour lunch.

The intern, a nice guy but over his head on this project, takes the list of data that the boss provided and works up a schedule of when to bring the college kids in to do the actual inventory. She also gave him a big roll of inventory stickers (above) that would indicate which computers had been inventoried.

Needless to say the whole project was a joke from start to finish. The inventory was done after-hours. And every morning after the nightly inventory we had several frantic calls from panicked or concerned users complaining of a wide variety of problems related to botched or incomplete inventory and upgrade.

One computer actually got dumped on the floor ruining the hard drive. That computer had not been backed-up and contained months of extremely valuable data. it cost thousands to recover that data.

Eventually the college kids finished counting the computers and causing more work then they saved and left us with a really big spreadsheet.

The boss, in her infinite wisdom, assigned one of her underlings to analyze the data, organize it properly and import it into our call tracking system. It was then presented to the big bosses and everyone of us in the trenches breathed a sigh of relief that it was over. Hah!

A couple of weeks later a stack of printouts was found on each of our desks. On closer examination this was the printout of the final inventory. One of the columns was empty, this was the column for the number on the inventory tag.

 

What happened?

We got the story from the intern that did most of the number crunching. It seems that the idiot boss failed to include a place to record the inventory tag number. So we paid a company $20-thou for an inventory that was essentially worthless because we had no way of identifying which computer was which.

So the job that we had outsourced because we didn’t have time and resources to do it ourself, had to be done over because our boss (who had the numbered labels specially printed in the first place) didn’t think to include that number in all the data that was collected.

I would be laughing my ass off if I wasn’t already crying. Fortunately she was fired a few months later. Rumor has it that the Not Recording Inventory Sticker Numbers On the Inventory was the last straw.

 

Originally posted before I added WordPress to this site. Published date is approximate.