I think you got it half right. i agree that " it's knowledgeable, CARING employees that make the difference!". These same type of "couldn't care less" employees are the ones that screw up very important and critical computerized inventory systems. Crap in, crap out......
Jerome
Yeah... definitely "crap in/crap out"... I worked in a nuclear plant, in one of the outage toolrooms for the subcontract employees, and it's computerized inventory system was SUCH a basket case I couldn't even do my job half the time. Every time I'd scan a guy's badge and try to check out the tools he asked for to him, half the stuff would come back as either "lost" or "broken" or just plain "not in the system". I'd have to jot the numbers down on a yellow legal pad and then go correct it all in the system later. They wanted us 'doing something" all the time, so when I wasn't checking out tools to employees (which usually came in spurts as the work packets were handed out to various subcontractors) I just started inventorying everything in the friggin' toolroom... pull ever box one by one and go through the contents, entering the numbers in the computer to see if they were "there" and "eligible to be checked out" (which the computer wouldn't let you check out a tool that was "missing" or "broken" or just plain had never been entered in the system. Thing was, EVERY tool that was bought by the plant had a tool number assigned to it and engraved on it by hand, it's just that the database was SO out of date and hadn't been maintained properly that it was practically useless... I'd grab a box, say "3/8 drive, 7/16 sockets" which might have 20 in the box and another 10-20 out circulating amongst contractors. I'd grab each one and one by one clean them up with a rag, enter the numbers, and see if it was "in stock", "checked out", "lost", "broken", or "number not found". If it was anything other than "in stock", I went through another menu and changed that number's status to "in stock". I found that at least 30-50% of the stuff in the toolroom wasn't even in the inventory or misclassified.
I worked on this off and on for the entire outage. At one point my supervisor came over and his foreman and we all went upstairs to the storage room of the toolroom for a "special assignment". They had TONS of tools up there ranging from little 4-5 millimeter "ignition wrenches" all the way up to hammer wrenches for 6 inch steam generator mounting bolts. Most of the stuff had been stacked up 3 feet high on a flimsy steel shelving unit that had subsequently collapsed under the massive weight at some point. It was my job to sift through this enormous pile of tools, restock anything in inventory that I needed, band about five wrenches together with zip ties to go into storage for other toolrooms (there were six in the plant and protected area, with two inside the reactors), and band the rest together to go to surplus sales. Specialized wrenches (like the aforementioned gigantic hammer wrenches for 6 inch diameter steam generator bolts) were to remain in inventory or storage. Once that was done, I was to sift though a series of bins, most holding brand spanking new thread taps that had been sitting in storage for YEARS and had NEVER BEEN USED... it was plain they were brand new because they still had the "rubber dip" coating put on them at the factory to protect the cutting edges during shipment and storage, but which has to be peeled off to use them the first time. These were HIGH DOLLAR taps too, some up to six inches in diameter, with various thread types for particular jobs... thing was, these had been in storage SO LONG that the etched in identifying numbers, with the thread diameter, pitch, and thread type, was obscured by rust on at least half of them, and just plain unreadable. My supervisor was sick-- of what we COULD identify, he had JUST BOUGHT a bunch more of them... "Look at this... I just blew half my toolroom budget ordering a bunch of these, and they've been here all the time..." I didn't say anything but found it infinitely amusing-- if the dumb-bunny would ever come out of his air conditioned office and actually LOOK AND SEE what was there in HIS area of responsibility that he had charge over, he would KNOW what he had and didn't have... maybe not item for item but at least have a pretty good idea of what was there, or even have the knowledge of where to send someone to LOOK and see if they had any or not, before spending tens of thousands of dollars for MORE of something they already had that had never been used! As it turns out, if I couldn't identify what the etched numbers were with certainty, I was ordered to throw them away... I probably threw away a DUMPSTER FULL of taps and dies from pencil size to around 6 inch diameter of stuff that I simply couldn't read, no matter how I tried to clean it or pick at it or try to decipher the rust-scaled numbers... I bet I tossed $100,000 bucks in tools... but NRC regs prohibit using them if the thread type and kind cannot be verified for QC purposes in the paperwork...
Anyway, I worked my way through all that, and toward the end of the outage I found out WHY the toolroom was such a basket case. One evening I came in and found this wheeled wagon, you know the air-up tire type sold as 'garden wagons' at the indoor lumberyards and farm supply stores and such... this thing had about a ton of tools on it, so much so the tires were about to blow out, stacked up about four feet high on the thing... Some of the contractors had finished en-masse and it was their last day at work, and they all make a bum-rush to the toolrooms to check in their tools, get a clean record, and get their final check and hit the road... (they don't get their final check til the tools are all accounted for). Of course the day shift guys are TOO LAZY to check in all the tools and MAKE SURE that everything is there-- they also don't want to listen to all the b!tching and complaining by the contractors standing outside their window, hollering to get checked out, get their last paycheck, and go get drunk... so they merely take whatever the guy shoves across the counter, go in and clear his account manually, so that when payroll pulls up his "account" it shows 'all clear' in the toolroom, so he can get his final check and hit the road... Then they throw everything onto this wagon to get 'checked back in by the night shift'...
Of course, what would happen then is, most of the night shift guys would just throw it back in the proper box on the shelves... they wouldn't actually check the stuff back in to the computer, since this was an additional step (and more work), they'd just enter everything as "lost" or "broken" or leave the number as "checked out" until it eventually reverted to "lost" after a given amount of time automatically within the inventory system. Nevermind it was actually on the shelf, in the box... They figured "what the h3ll, a regular full-time guy will catch it during an inventory later on, so who cares?" Of course they'd never do an inventory, so these problems would continue to get worse and worse as time went by. In the end, the supervisor sitting in his office would be looking at the inventory, and see that he only had say 3-4 sockets in a given box, for instance, and say to himself, "ooh, I need to reorder some of those-- gotta have more than that for outage!" and reorder the d@mn things, never bothering to actually go look in the toolroom and the given box itself to see if the tools were actually there, in which case the box probably had 2-3 DOZEN sockets in it and NONE were needing to be ordered... Huge costs for tooling orders that WEREN'T needed, and shortchanging stuff that SHOULD have been ordered more of, or replaced, or whatever...
It was really pathetic. I basically inventoried the entire toolroom before my outage was over, and in our "exit interview" when they asked what they could do better, or how to improve the job or toolrooms, I suggested a FULL INVENTORY OF *ALL* TOOLROOMS at least once per year, to straighten out just this sort of gradually accumulating mess... also a little more training and diligence and perhaps adjusting checkout procedures for contract employees, to prevent the sort of 'mass dumping' of tools and 'rubber stamping' their records for checkout... no telling how many tools actually "walked off" due to these haphazard checkout procedures... I could tell by the looks on their faces, that wasn't what they really wanted to hear... I guess they were looking for some strokin', love, and admiration... Whatever... if they wanted warm smoke up the butt they asked the wrong guy... I call it like I see it...
I also wondered why they had a BRAND SPANKING NEW computer in the back, one of those new-fangled "pentium 2" machines at the time, and an outdated dinosaur 486 DX2 doing the toolroom inventory program, and connected to the plant's network. The brand new machine in the back wasn't on the plant's network, and was ONLY used to do the order forms and record the temperatures of the rod ovens when they were checked twice a day... IOW, virtually nothing-- a couple spreadsheets. As it turned out, they HAD tried the new machine in the toolroom and moved the old one to the back in stand-alone for the spreadsheets... BUT, when they hooked up the new machine to the plant's internal network, every time someone tried to check out a tool, or check something in, or change status or whatever, it would mysteriously cause valves to close or open, or turn pumps on or off, or close relays or open them... close steam valves or what not-- so after getting the high-priced tech guys trying to work out why the new-fangled computer was sending spurious control signals into the reactors, they decided the best way to fix the problem was to put the new computer in the back room in stand-alone mode, and put the old junker back up front running the scanner and tool inventory system in the plant network... Better than causing a meltdown I guess...
Oh well...
Computers are great, make no mistake, but they're a tool, and like any tool, they are only as good as the person running it... They can be misused, abused, or left to rust...
Later! OL JR
