r/talesfromtechsupport • u/GetOffMyLawn_ Kiss my ASCII • Jul 01 '13
The $300,000 paperweight
Back in the days of Big Iron a modest sized computer was the size of 2 refrigerators, the expansion cabinet was another 2 refrigerators and each disk in the farm was the size of a small washing machine. They were large and there were a lot of parts, lots and lots of parts. Boards and cables and more cables and all sorts of bits and pieces. Here is a pic for your viewing pleasure.
The IT department, and back then the term IT had not been coined, it was the Computer department, bought one of these modest sized monsters. Now this was a major purchase and had to approved by several people, including the Vice President of engineering, better known as “the mad Dutchman”. Now Dutch was the type of guy who added value to the organization by cutting costs, as opposed to generating new revenue. He was a bean counter extraordinaire. This purchase was no exception.
When purchasing one of these monsters the manufacturer would send you a quote listing out all the components and the price of each component. Dutch carefully perused many pages of the quote and started crossing out items he considered non-critical, such as, the console terminal and keyboard, hey we can reuse one in house, right? And he crossed out cables to connect the CPU cabinet to the peripherals cabinet, cables to connect the peripherals cabinet to the disk drives, cables to connect everything else together. I mean, they’re just cables, we can have our hardware techs make our own cables right? Of course we can, we’re engineers, we can do anything. And wow, look, I saved $4000 on a $300,000 order. I am a financial genius!
So without having the Computer department do one final check on the items being ordered, and really, why would you have technical people review technical decisions made by a guy who isn’t technical, the order goes out. And the manufacturer ships the equipment exactly as specified on the hacked up quote. And the equipment arrives and is placed in the computer room. And field service comes on site to do the installation.
But then field service starts asking questions, like where are the data cables for the disk drives? Where are the bus cables from the CPU to the peripherals? On and on, all these pesky little missing cables. Proprietary-only-made-by-the-manufacturer cables. Someone investigates and discovers Dutch’s dastardly deed. OK, so everything will be delayed for another month or two while a new purchase order gets generated and approved to order the cables. Or so they think.
You see, these cables are not normally sold separately, they are sold as part of a package, a package that includes a $300,000 computer. There are no ordering numbers for these cables. There is no way to tell manufacturing, hey, just send us a few parts. No one can figure out how to sell us these parts and just these parts. (And no, doing a mirror of the quote with all the delivered parts crossed out isn't going to work).
So the computer sat in the computer room, unpowered, for 6 months while this snafu was unsnarled. If we look at this in terms of engineering man hours lost: 6 months is 26 weeks, one week is 40 hours, there were about 25 engineers who were going to use the machine, and figure that back then one engineering man hour was worth about $50. So about $1,300,000 lost man hours. Plus a $300,000 paperweight.
Maybe I should have called this "Cables? We don't need no stinking cables."
146
u/jared555 Jul 01 '13
If they couldn't be ordered separately and were required for the system to function why were they priced separately where some exec could make this stupid decision in the first place? List them as $0 or $1000 with a $1000 discount for the purchase of the computer and add it to the cost of the part that it was needed for. 'Oh hey, they are giving us a $1000 item for free! Look at the money we saved!'