Here is some pure Megacorp efficienty at work. Megacorp has this thing called the Megacorp mall. It's some on-line hell you use to shop and buy the stuff you need at work. Toner cartridges, nuts, bolts, printers, CD-R's, office chairs.... whatever. Anyway, the search sucks. Take the worse part of every online place you have been to, combine them all, and you are still 10 times better than the Megacorp mall.
Case and point. A facility we have in Canada wanted to order some Megacorp baseball hats. Sort of as a morale building thing. She looks through the Megacorp official merchandise catalog for all the crap they have with the Megacorp label/symbol. She finds some baseball caps. She goes online to order them and places an order. She gets a call a day or two later saying their order will be shipping but, there is an extra charge because it is international. Well, she figures fine, I am in Canada.. that's what they must mean by International. Not quite.
The vendor of these shitty hats is in Missouri or something. They have to send them to England in order for England to them ship them to Canada. Yeah, this really makes sense. She told them to forget it and went to the local sports store, bought some blank hats, and had a place copy the Megacorp symbol/icon from a piece of stationary onto the hat. She got her hats in much less time and at much less cost than going to the Megacorp Mall.
More fun at work today. Megacorp has lots of aquisitions all running on legacy systems. Our parent company uses an AS400. now, I know dick about an AS400 but, some marketing type wants to print out a report, a 8000 page report, to one of our printers. I told her which printer was set up for printing from the AS400. We have a high speed copier/printer thing that does not interface with the AS400, but I told her that if there was a way you can get this report to a file and then you can print that file to the high speed copier, it may save you some time.
Well, she calls the folks at the facility where the AS400 is and they send her to a guy who is visiting here for a meeting (unrelated to this issue). He then chases me down to ask me some AS400 questions and if I have some piece of software or not. Now, what the hell is this guy coming to me for? Since when am I the AS400 expert. I mean, then one of their folks has a question about our Oracle system, I don't send them to someone who is not familiar with our systems.
We received a complaint today about invoices not being received by some customers. Now, we used to print all our invoices here at Smallcorp. A couple of months after we were aquired by Megacorp, our invoicing person was let go and the invoicing system (PC, printer, Software) was moved to our corporate headquarters who could do it much better and cheaper and faster and whatever.
Well, this last batch of invoices went out without any postage. DOH!!! No wonder they were returned. This is just the latest in a string of foulups that have consisted of accidently turning the invoices into credits and mailing those to the customer, missing complete invoice runs, and other more minor issues.
Yeah, they are doing it MUCH better than we did. Our invoicing person spent like 3 or 4 hours a day on invoicing. She then did other stuff for the remaining 4 or 5 hours a day. Now, she's gone, and these numbskulls do it for us AND charge us $1800 per month. This is saving money? If you break this down hourly, our invoicing person was far cheaper.
I have learned that big companies think they have cost control but, they do not. All these charges and such are company funny money being charged and credited between different facilities or departments. Some of the pricing is bad to. Megacorp supposedly has these deals with major vendors like MSC and Boise and such. Well, I was on the Megacorp mall in the Boise section and found a 20GB IDE had for sale.. it was only $99. Such a deal? A 40Gb was $149. Gee, I'll take 2!!!. Like, how is this cheaper than me going to any mail order place and getting the same drives for 50% less? The truth is..... it's not better. Someone has convinced someone else (neither of which probably knows enough to make an educated decision), that going with Boise will get us some big discount and that even if the actual price is higher, there are costs to be saved by keeping the paperwork down and sticking with one vendor and blah blah blah. Yeah, there are economies of scale that can be found but, no one found any here!!