I was speaking to one of our Business unit's controllers last week. Their business unit is having great difficulties on obtaining the raw materials needed to make the product they make. Why are they having trouble? Short supply? Embargo? No......... Megacorp has recently changed their payment terms from net 45 to net 60 (see other blog entry about this story). Well, the suppliers don't want to wait 60 days to get paid so they are not selling this business unit any more raw materials.
Now, it's bad enough this particular unit is having trouble making sales but now....... even if they make the sale it appears that the possibility exists they will not be able to get the raw materials necessary to ship the product they just sold.
More fun at Megacorp today. One of our programmers found some corruption in the Oracle database that Megacorp had us move from our facility to their datacenter at the end of 2002. The reasoning was they could manage it better and it would cost less and blah blah blah. Anyway, they charged us $250,000 to move it and another $10,000 per month to manage (or, mis-manage) it.
Anyway, this database is now corrupt. So much for them managing it better. We have an identical system at our datacenter still that some other facilities use (it was not moved to the Megacorp datacenter for other reasons) and guess what, Our database isn't hosed! Imagine that! So, not only do they charge us $10,000 a month to manage this, but they screwed it up as well. These people are the experts? I know for a fact our DBA did not make $10k a month. Shit, it would have been cheaper to keep him on and the files would not get corrupt because he knows what he is doing. He's not some foreigner right off the boat who can spell Oracle, much less interact with Oracle.
We have support with the software vendor (our MRP software vendor) and they said they can get into the database and fix the errors. Well, it took our programming manager all day to get a temporary VPN account and Oracle/UNIX account set up on the Unix server that has this database. She started at about 10 AM asking about this and at about 5 PM, she got all the necessary accounts created and she emailed it to the MRP software support person so he could go in and fix the problem. Now, she does not actually make the account. She weaves thought a maze of web forms and crap to submit this information to have a non-Megacorp employee have these accounts for an emergency situation. Some outsourced dipshit making $5 a day probably actually makes the accounts.
Well, since it took them all goddamn day, when she mailed the account info to the support person, he had already left for the day. This was a Friday. He tried to get in on Monday morning using the information he received and nothing worked. Our programming manager called the Megacorp Help Desk to find out why and it turns out those accounts were delete because they are only allowed to be active for 24 hours. One one of the webforms was an area that asked how long these accounts are needed for. She put in 2 weeks yet, they were turned off in 24 hours. If these accounts get deleted after 24 hours, why the hell does the webform have an entry for you put in how long you want them for?
Is it only me who sees the insanity of this? It takes all day to make an account and then by the time the person who actually needs it gets around to using it, the account is deleted.
Yeah, this is productive.
Well, today was a banner day. Our office manager/secretary/AP person/gopher/"Insert menial job title here" received a letter from AT&T 2 days ago. It stated that we owe AT&T $40,000 and if we did not pay them by 4 PM CST today, they could and would (as outlined in their contract) shut off all our service. Now she had this for a day or two but didn't come to me (or anyone else) about it until today. Did she not read it? Is it not clear enough? I have no idea why the delay but, what is done is done so I had to do what I could.
This bill that is late is for long distance service to about 20 former Smallcorp plants. I called my boss and told him what was going on and that Megacorp has not paid the bills, eventhough I sent the bills to them as they requested. I then called my contact at megacorp and got voicemail. I then called AT&T to buy some time (I can usually get them to hold off a week or two... this has happened before) and got more voicemail.
Well, the person from megacorp called and I told him what was going on. He looked into whatever crappy-ass system they have to do this and found out that the bill I sent him in early December was not released to pay, so he released it. he also saw that the bill I sent him in early January was also not released to be paid, so he released it. He mentioned something about the vendor (AT&T) being set up as Net 60 terms. Net 60 means that 60 days after you send the bill,
Megacorp will cut the check.
Now, this happens time and time again where a utility like the electric company or the phone bills are set up as Net 60 where there are guidelines saying they should be immediate pay. Yet, they keep doing this. We were 2 hours from having all the long distance service cut off in about 20 locations. Really, I was sort of half-hoping that they could not get this straightened out fast enough and the lines would be turned off. Our remote facilities could not even call us to find out why there is no long distance. I'd laugh my ass into oblivion.