http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-38662892 so we want your product but arent going to pay you till later, and because you dont agree we are going to drop you as a supplier.So possible job loses.

When i worked in the nhs, 2 people who cleared drains and gutters made redundant, heavy rainfall and a few roofs fell in or flooded the departments below, one an operating theatre.Huge cost for repairs and disruption.

Major retailer, had 2 tubes removed from every 4 tube fitting to save electric, electrian tried telling manager the same power would be used, but yet he still had to throw out 2 tubes per fitting, didnt find out if the manager knew flourecent tubes are not allowed to be placed in trade waste,they are classed as hazardous wate and should be disposed of seperately at a cost.

Place I used to work had three industrial dryers and three washing machines. To cut costs the staff were told to only use one at once. They also did the exact same thing with the lights as outlined above.

I think it would be rather instructive to see the salaries and benefits for the top 20 staff in the health trust – cars/pensions/etc and see if any of the payments are going to be deferred to the next financial year.

Another healthcare one.

Working in a care home. they only recruited to cover the actual number of staff on duty not allowing for sickness and holidays. Regular staff were asked to cover holidays with extra shifts. Usually they didn’t so extra staff had to be got from the agency ( legally enforceable minimum staffing requirement) Holidays and sickness are usually around 15 %. the bill for agency was way more than the cost of recruiting those extra people to cover holidays and sickness

We’ve always done overtime to complete works that can’t happen during normal working hours.
New leader banned overtime to save money.Over 12 months he saved maybe £15000 -£20000 and was penalised£100000 for not completing work on time.
He had the cheek to fanfare his overtime savings but swept the fine under the carpet.
Aaaaaggghhh.

and again when i worked in the nhs, the mangement canceled a £20 per year subscription to a magazine a lot of us would read, just went out and bought my own.

Then threw hundreds of quids worth of stock in a skip, and smashed up hundreds of side lockers, because nobody would accept responsibility for selling them to care homes, that asked for them and where willing to pay for them.

tjagain Having been that agency cover many times is beneficial to say the least.

When I worked in the bank- maintenance contract for desktop PCs cancelled as “unneccesary expense”. Every desktop PC in bank filled with dust and overheated, slowing down and failing completely. We had one die- IT man came and replaced base unit, wasn’t allowed to do anything about the other 15 PCs full of dust until they broke. Caused tons of downtime and loss of service not to mention dead hardware.

Member of slt at a school demoted. Forgetvthe detail but they had to pay her the higher wage for a year or so before the lower wage kicked in. So she got paid lots for a lower role then retired.

Sounds like she had a protected wage deal.

Large insurance company:

Various ancient and incompatable IT systems patched together by sallow skinned chainsmokers with rickets and a deep understanding of how to make it all work.
Sack them all, then rehire them at higher rates exactly a week later after it’s all fallen apart.

Sack the team that analyzes complaints and comes up with ways to keep everyone on the right side of the FSA.
Then pay out many, many millions in fines due to procedures not being followed correctly.

I could go on.

Another NHS one – Mrs Jay is a district nurse, job comes with a mobile that can’t be used for personal calls, despite the fact that an organisation as large as an NHS trust would have no problem negotiating an all you can eat usage contract.

Gave her a Nokia indestructiphone – as we all know battery lasts forever, great 2G signal etc. Jobbed.

Year later they were taken away and replaced with EE branded smart phones to make use of an app to automate expenses (stupid idea for a few reasons).

Sadly in traditional non joined up NHS thinking the IT security team disabled all web access on it either by mobile signal or wifi, its a non-smart phone with all the downsides of a crap smartphone – crap battery and signal. Useless. Oh and they can’t load the app on it.

Rusty Spanner – Member

Sack the team that analyzes complaints and comes up with ways to keep everyone on the right side of the FSA.
Then pay out many, many millions in fines due to procedures not being followed correctly.

Hah. That’s amateur stuff, my lot essentially transformed the compliance department into the “evading regulation” department. They came into our office one day and said, right, we’re doing a surprise spot check in 3 days time, tell us what we can safely inspect without finding any problems. PS we definitely won’t look in that cupboard over there, nudge nudge.

NHS – we use paper cups to bolus feed patients via ng tubes. Paper cups are now no longer available to order because we were using too many for the bean counters in the offices.

We have enough plastic water cups for one per patient. Maybe.

So now on the ward we use the pg tips cups off the tea trolley, throw away the tea bag and create more cost. :-/
2 cups per time. Per patient. 3-4 times a day.

We did argue it but then who are we on the ward floor to know what we need?

Place I am at right now. They want to upgrade a 10 year old version of our product because it’s gone out of service. Upgrading to an intermediate version rather than the latest will mean they won’t have to re-do a few weeks of work they’ve already done. Intermediate version goes out of service in early 2018.

Project will take months anyway, so if they go to the intermediate product they’d only have a few months of support left before having to start all over again with another upgrade.

NHS again.

Rolling out a system into an AHP department, they weren’t allowed to buy an extra PC so they used one in another office (down the corridor) to print, cost probably 5 mins per hour per Band 6&7.

A basestation PC costs less than £5 per week to buy/run…

My previous company bidding for work at stupidly low rates, then expecting us to do it at stupidly low margins then looking to make redundancies as profits were shite so we have to cut costs. Oh, and when as a department we said we weren’t going to do the work as it was going to be loss making we were threatened with disciplinary action. Total bell ends!

But nearly three years after leaving, my old work phone still works and is on a contract It’s now my biking emergency phone as the battery lasts weeks and I don’t care if I smash it in a crash.

Post private equity buyout vultures with an eye on cutting costs…

Cancelled plant (yucca etc) maintenance contract. One month later all plants now brown and dead. Replaced all plants, restarted contract.

Replaced paper stock with 80gsm thin-as-u-like shite (was 90-100 before). Printers get dusty inside and start to jam several times daily.

Scrutiny of expenses down to the mile – had a phone conversation around 2 mile difference between claimed mileage and what multimap said. Took around 10 mins @ £30 per hour to resolve “just this once”. Cost of claim? 28p.

All new stationery bought from cheapest range; scissors would break, staplers not staple, pens run out etc etc. I still have my liberated stock of decent stuff 😉

Insurance co – “new” IT system ordered and put into place across 300+ offices many in very rural locations. No pilot or real test. Needed broadband to run when some offices still on isdn and some even on dialup! Utter shambles – cost a main board director his job albeit with a 200k payoff. They still have it and spend is 50m+ apparently. They also have to develop it in house as it’s so old the developer doesn’t support it anymore… and they were offered the chance to buy the software company but refused as it was too expensive.

So much for private sector efficiency! Seems to be a fair balance on here.

I work for a well known insurers, where we will happily pay people like James Corden to appear at whatever ridiculous fee he asks to sell our policies, but may of our systems cannot talk to each other and are from the 80’s (think black screen and green writing!)

Moved to a fantastic new office, but with nowhere near as much parking as old, so we now have to park 2 miles away and they pay £1000 per member of staff to park there and have to run a bus service every 20 minutes (often empty except 9am and 5pm) because you have to walk across two busy A Roads to get to said car park otherwise!

My wife worked for NHS in Guildford hospital, they kept losing staff to London hospitals as it was an easy commute, so they paid them a “london retention bonus” after a few years, they decided that this costs too much, stopped it, lost loads of staff and had to employ loads of less skilled agency staff and a lot more than the bonus was.

Oil industry is king of this.

E.g.
Permanent replacement chemical pump = ~£10,000
Temporary chemical pump = £~£600/month. For 60 months and counting.

Something to do with one falling under OPEX and one falling under CAPEX, and the two being different budgets, but when it ultimately all comes out of the same pot I don’t quite understand the thinking.

Chemical lab I used to work at was outfitting the new wing. They asked the staff for suggestions, especially around efficiency, cost-saving etc.

Loads of suggestions like solar panels, a wind turbine out the back and a water-recycling system for the condensers. We’d had that at my old place and it worked like a central heating system in reverse. A closed system pipes water round the reaction coolers and condensers, returns to a chiller unit and comes round again. Putting that in at new-build phase is easy and far cheaper than retro-fitting it although obviously still more expensive than not having one.

So they went with not having one – basically the water cooling simply used regular taps being on all the time and discharging the water straight to the drains.

Then the company got fined £50,000 for putting more than it’s legal limit of water down the drains (bear in mind this is essentially drinking water and all it’s doing is going round a cooling jacket then down the drain at the rate of about 250,000 litres a week). Criminal wastage of water. Also, the fine was way more than the cost of putting in a water-recyling unit.

Something to do with one falling under OPEX and one falling under CAPEX, and the two being different budgets, but when it ultimately all comes out of the same pot I don’t quite understand the thinking. [/I]

This.

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/7629/845/1600/321283/dilbert_budget_games.gif

NHS again. Endoscopy unit reception, it’s all gel dispensers and ‘Infection Control’ posters. Patient toilet cleaning rota:

Good to know the bogs have been cleaned this year. Just.

Oil industry is king of this.

E.g.
Permanent replacement chemical pump = ~£10,000
Temporary chemical pump = £~£600/month. For 60 months and counting.

Something to do with one falling under OPEX and one falling under CAPEX, and the two being different budgets, but when it ultimately all comes out of the same pot I don’t quite understand the thinking.

could write a book on this …. but in a skeletons in the closet kind of way id probably get sacked for opening the door on the closet the managers have been hiding these sorta things in.

Patient toilet cleaning rota:

FFS. That is disgusting. It would get done more often if the patients were roped in to do it.

Or are they doing it, but not recording the fact?

This is a beaut-

Myself and the neighbours have got a communal patch of land that we commonly look after, and we’d had a fairly well-observed but friendly set of rules that we all adhered to. Nothing onerous- it worked on a kind of barter system really- I’d mow the big lawn one week, the one we all looked out on, in return Paolo across the way would take all the bins in. It worked really well, and things got even better when one of the neighbours suggested at a meeting that we build a communal vegetable patch in the middle, barter the contributions, maybe even sell the rest on.

The produce from it was awesome; some of my neighbours are quite cosmopolitan and had contributed all kinds of things. The best thing about it though was everyone kicked in- we had all kinds of stuff growing there, and as long as you were contributing, you could take from it. We’d even got a little system going where some of the less-well off neighbours could take a wee bit more- they’ll turn the corner at some point and we’ll all get the benefit then. Somehow, after we got the rules up and running, everyone pitched in.

Well, you can guess what happened next. One of the neighbours- we’ll not mention his real name, but John will do- fell on hard times. It was his own fault; he’d got mixed up in some shady business deals, didn’t really read the T&Cs, lost a packet.

Suddenly, he’s wanting to know why he’s having to kick in all this effort when he’s getting nothing back. Suddenly, its all: what am I getting from this, you guys are ripping me off, and I didn’t agree to any of this bartering vegetable stuff, it started out as grasscutting! Well, what could we do? If he really wanted to stop pitching in, then we couldn’t really give him free veg, could we? That was the nature of the deal.

So of course he’s doing his own thing now, buying from the greengrocer in the town, who knows that he can’t get any from us and makes him pay full market rate.

All for the sake of him maybe just realising that he had a good deal, and got something well worth having out of it. The berk.

That toilet cleaning rota is either not being completed or there’s something else wrong as they have to be done at once a day.

We’ve struggled to meet targets this year due to UK government psychopathy, brexit, increased competition, and economic downturns in oil countries, and our overseas operations have all effectively become more expensive because of the slump in the pound. So we’re getting a budget cut for next year to help us counter all of that. I’m not sure if this is allowed in this thread, because it’s not gone wrong yet.

NHS – make the band 2 admin girls redundant. Make the band 7 managers do the admin; now we need to pay them OT at x1.5 because there aren’t enough hours in the day to complete the donkey work admin…

The best I’ve seen in O&G is the platform that decommissioned their drilling rig including parts of 5 good generators knowing they had power issues. They have subsequently gone through millions of pounds worth of hire and long term temporary generators to supplement the dodge main generators and a multi million pound project to get a power back feed from another installation that to this day has never provided a single volt for an issue that could have been solved for a fraction of the cost by re-building just 3 of the drilling generators. They would have even had spare parts to keep them going.

The mind boggles.

That toilet cleaning rota is either not being completed or there’s something else wrong as they have to be done at once a day.

You’d have to assume so wouldn’t you. The 6 day old newspaper and used wet wipes in reception look a bit iffy tho. Sad times 🙁

Won’t mention companies involved, but deadlines in their business cant be moved, whatever the scenario…

Company A was getting quite close to meeting it’s deadline needing to get about 20 pretty large parts machined, the tolerances needed for these parts are ridiculously tight but company A has spent years developing it’s machining method and order or processes, with a team of 5 very skilled machinists to manage it each year, each part costing in the area of £25000 in materials and time.

Some bright spark at company A sees company B does “precision machining” so gets a quote for these parts, company B claims it won’t take as long as company A claims and undercuts by about 50% of the in house machining costs of company A, promising to meet the tolerances and timescale with no problem.

Turns out company B didn’t actually have the capacity due to taking on very similar work from a few other companies, so contracts company C and D to do the work, inspecting the parts them self to cover their backs. 2 Days before deadline parts come back to B from C and D, nowhere near tolerance, some from D even having a major feature completely wrong by about 2mm (we’re talking 0.005mm tolerances here)

Company B forwards these items to A, a day late and with a note in the truck (handwritten) apologizing for a “few rough edges” but saying they will knock 10% off the price.

Company A decides to do their own inspection to find zero out of the 16 parts that have turned up (20 ordered) are to spec, company B finally comes clean and offers to rectify problems within 30 days.

Company A ended up machining 12 of the parts in house, running a 24/7 rotor to get them done, shipping them out to the deadline event by plane 24 hours before they were needed costing at least double the original cost, and still having to pay company B for the 8 they made.

County council:

Process requires just 2 labels for files.

Individual label printer: £150

Throwing away almost a full A4 sheet of labels every time you need just 2: priceless

This story was brought to me by someone in the audience after I did a talk on how much I hate “fun” offices:

A startup had a glass wall around the space under a staircase, and people kept walking into it. Instead of putting some decals or something on it to make the glass more visible, they decided it would be cooler and more “startuppy” to have a ball pit. Except, that many ball pit balls are expensive, so they filled the space up with cardboard boxes and just put balls around the sides and on top. A symbolic ball pit then. The boxes were warm and dark, so in no time at all it attracted rats, and they ended up with a fake ball bit concealing a load of shit and piss.

Years ago, I was “IT Manager” – in reality the IT department as I was the only one there – for a multi-site civil engineering company for whom “IT” was a dirty word.

Whilst there I developed an Intranet system from scratch. The main focus was calendaring system, where HR could record staff leave and holidays and the like, but there was a (fairly crude TBH) document retrieval system and a few other odds and sods. I suppose it was agile development before such a thing existed; I had the radical idea of talking to the users before I started and then making changes based on their requests, so whilst it had its flaws the design and workflow was exactly what they wanted.

Anyway. Out of the blue one day they dragged me into the office for a disciplinary, where they presented me with a three-page long document cataloguing my “misdemeanours.” All trumped-up shite; a random example was “spending all day on site to fix one PC.” That day I’d gone to site and, as anyone who’s ever done this will know, I was immediately jumped upon with a load of “whilst you’re here” requests that they’d been saving up for me. I fixed three printers, five PCs and a handful of other random requests, something that I could’ve happily explained later had anyone actually asked rather than my manager just adding it to his little shitlist.

So we went through this list and all bar one of the accusations I had an explanation for. The one that was actually true was being late one day – it was over an hour’s commute and there’d been a smash on the M6 resulting in massive tailbacks. They said “well, you knew where you lived when you took the job.” I replied, “you knew where I lived when you offered it me.”

At the end of it they said something like “well, we don’t think you’ve got a future at this company” and offered me something like three grand to go away quietly. I hated the place, I was run ragged for little thanks and it was making me ill, so I grabbed it.

It later turned out that one of the driving reasons they wanted rid of me is that that they had someone lined up in another department to do my job only on a lower salary. I’ve no idea what they saved but it couldn’t have been that much, I wasn’t on a massive amount; about 20K in 2001 IIRC.

Fast forward several years and by chance I bumped into my replacement, and asked him how things were. Turned out that after I left no-one knew how to maintain my hand-coded Intranet system – I was never asked to document it and my in-line comments were aide memoirs to myself which would make little sense to anyone else, and the heavy lifting for the security authentication hinged on a custom .DLL file written by a mate of mine and living on a different server entirely – so they’d bought a commercial offering to replace it at a cost of fifty grand.

On top of this, they then threw who knows how much on subsequent maintenance costs to make bespoke changes to it. Despite all this they couldn’t get it to do what they wanted it to do, everyone was still using my system instead as it worked and the users loved it.

I laughed. A lot.

A university friend thought he would save a few quid in buying a can of oil for his car – he could top up from his dad’s supply when he got home for Christmas the next week.
The engine siezed on the way home…

Love some of these stories – genius 🙂

Freelance engineer with a major contractor, they wouldn’t pay me an additional £3/hr for my own survey equipment as they wanted me to use their kit, so I used to wait up to 3hours every day to use their shared kit, at £26/hr, sat in the van listening to the radio, every day for 9 months.

Happy days.

Adult Social Care- purchase senior practitioner grade up smart phones, so they can work more effectively (ie get emails….sigh). Joint fund an adult safeguarding app, so that when social care manager’s update progress, both health and social care workers can see the progress. Less time info sharing. App only works on Android and iPhone’s, adult care bought window’s phone’s.