Reminds me of the story of the warehouseman who refused to give someone the last of an item in the warehouse because that would mean they’d be out of stock.
Ah. There’s a reasons for that, as told to me by a supply sergeant in the military. A lot of suppliers had a BEL (Basic Equipment List), which says all stock must have a minimum and a maximum of XYZ in order to meet government spec. Some large items, like diesel generators, have a BEL minimum of 2, but also because of their size and storage complexity, have a maximum of 2. So it order to get a new one, you must get rid of one of the old ones. But if you get rid of the old one, you are below minimum BEL, and could fail inspection or an inventory check, if it takes a while to get a new one. Large items don’t always “hang around,” but they get manufactured on demand, so the only way to get a new one is to be without one for a very long period of time. Thus, you risk failing inspection. The best way to avoid that is to keep two and never order any.
On top of that, everything is ordered by article number. So it happened on a boat that they needed two replacement bolts for the engine. The engineer wrote the order, and the captain signed it and sent it to HQ.
They were informed the order would take (a long time). When they finally got the word that the order was in, they were astonished that two heavy load trucks were waiting for them. Each containing a turbine nearly as big as their boat. Which had nearly the same inventory number as the bolts. With two digits switched.
While I get the joke, I feel obliged to point out that the military is one of the very few places this could potentially makes sense (not saying it does in this case): You can basically decide that the warehouse is responsible for holding emergency stock, not ordering materiel that is produced on-demand for daily use. Essentially, if it’s produced on-demand, why would you want to go via to warehouse to get it? There are plenty of reasons you could want that of course, but if we ignore those, then the rationale can make sense.
I worked at a printing factory once, and we often needed to replace roller pins for paper, it’s an enormous metal cylinders that, despite being couple of tons hunks of metal, were very prone to being harmed. They were in pairs and should’ve been changed in pairs so they wear out evenly. The problem is, in a warehouse, the item is “a pair of pins” but the task for a repair crew is “change a pin” which includes ordering a transportation. The problem is, if you’re making a “change of a pin” you can only order a “transportation of a pin”, but warehouse can only issue a “pair of pins”, which transportation can’t move. The corpo spent weeks trying to solve this conundrum, until the machine broke completely (a roller pin snapped if you can imagine that). After spending the entire year’s revenue on fixing it all, they fired a bunch of people for following their corporate rules too precisely.
Reminds me of the story of the warehouseman who refused to give someone the last of an item in the warehouse because that would mean they’d be out of stock.
Ah. There’s a reasons for that, as told to me by a supply sergeant in the military. A lot of suppliers had a BEL (Basic Equipment List), which says all stock must have a minimum and a maximum of XYZ in order to meet government spec. Some large items, like diesel generators, have a BEL minimum of 2, but also because of their size and storage complexity, have a maximum of 2. So it order to get a new one, you must get rid of one of the old ones. But if you get rid of the old one, you are below minimum BEL, and could fail inspection or an inventory check, if it takes a while to get a new one. Large items don’t always “hang around,” but they get manufactured on demand, so the only way to get a new one is to be without one for a very long period of time. Thus, you risk failing inspection. The best way to avoid that is to keep two and never order any.
Military logic.
On top of that, everything is ordered by article number. So it happened on a boat that they needed two replacement bolts for the engine. The engineer wrote the order, and the captain signed it and sent it to HQ.
They were informed the order would take (a long time). When they finally got the word that the order was in, they were astonished that two heavy load trucks were waiting for them. Each containing a turbine nearly as big as their boat. Which had nearly the same inventory number as the bolts. With two digits switched.
E4 mafia could probably fix that and a few other issues.
While I get the joke, I feel obliged to point out that the military is one of the very few places this could potentially makes sense (not saying it does in this case): You can basically decide that the warehouse is responsible for holding emergency stock, not ordering materiel that is produced on-demand for daily use. Essentially, if it’s produced on-demand, why would you want to go via to warehouse to get it? There are plenty of reasons you could want that of course, but if we ignore those, then the rationale can make sense.
that’s just cheating the system to achieve some metric
What gets measured gets done. For good or ill.
I worked at a printing factory once, and we often needed to replace roller pins for paper, it’s an enormous metal cylinders that, despite being couple of tons hunks of metal, were very prone to being harmed. They were in pairs and should’ve been changed in pairs so they wear out evenly. The problem is, in a warehouse, the item is “a pair of pins” but the task for a repair crew is “change a pin” which includes ordering a transportation. The problem is, if you’re making a “change of a pin” you can only order a “transportation of a pin”, but warehouse can only issue a “pair of pins”, which transportation can’t move. The corpo spent weeks trying to solve this conundrum, until the machine broke completely (a roller pin snapped if you can imagine that). After spending the entire year’s revenue on fixing it all, they fired a bunch of people for following their corporate rules too precisely.