...and the horse you rode in on

Every now and then you get presented with an opportunity, and when that opportunity manifests itself you have a choice to make; should you take the high road and conduct yourself with class or should you just let loose and follow your reactionary instincts?

Just yesterday I had such an opportunity present itself. Let me give you some backstory...

As many of you know I was severed out of my last position back in April. For the 2 years prior to this severance we worked in the worst conditions you can imagine this side of China. In a nutshell, the company that purchased us a few years ago doesn't do their own distribution, they're known for going the 3PL route. 3PL is 3rd party logistics. We were a 1PL, 1st party logistics facility, we were all employees of the company who's product was shipped from our facility. So when we were purchased the writing was on the wall pretty much right away. Eventually they brought in 1 temp agency to provide all our labor needs and direct the temporary workforce. This was ostensibly done under the guise of preventing a co-employment issue, but we knew the real reason. We knew they were going to flip us to 3PL as soon as this company had its feet on the ground and had a grasp on how to run the business.

We did everything asked of us to help them succeed, but this was an incredibly horseshit company and they managed to damn near destroy our business. Eventually the powers that be on our company's end gave that company the boot and brought in a new 3PL to take over. Let's call them Bob's Logistics (not the real name of course). So Bob's comes in, and they are arrogant as fuck. They ignore all of our procedures and commence to finishing the destruction of our business that the prior 3PL had begun. And since our company's upper management already had their asses in the wringers over the failure (very, very expensive failure) of the first company they were dead set on doing whatever they had to to make Bob's Logistics succeed. They even went so far as to accuse us, the full time employees, of sabatoging the process to make them look bad. I will tell you right now that this is not true, not even a little.

Things got so bad that they weren't finishing picking orders that were due for pickup the next day. The previous company had this issue too, but Bob's took it to a new level. And we tried to point out where it was they were failing. We had been running the business prior to them showing up, we had trained and directed the temporary work force and we never had any of these problems. Ever. Our inventory accuracy was so close to 100% it was unbelievable, and this was a 500,000 square foot facility jam packed with product. Over 30,000 pallet locations, to be exact. And we could account at any given time for just about every case in that warehouse. I think the average amount of cases we "lost" per month was under 20 and we usually figured that was due to theft.

So anyway, Bob's was drowning in their failure. Their 2 biggest problems were receiving errors and picking incompetence. This is where I got dragged into it. My main job responsibility was to oversee the processing of customer orders in SAP for picking that night. It was a pretty complex job but I had it locked down tight, procedures were good and in place and we really never had any problems. Then Bob's management decided to blame me, personally, for their picking problems. You see, they claimed that it was because my department wasn't getting them the orders in time for them to get a timely start on the picking and finish that night. Their pickers started at 3pm, picking started at 3:15pm. Bob's claimed they weren't getting any orders to pick until at least 5pm every night.

So of course our upper management (not our local management, who told Bob's to get fucked when they suggested it was my fault) jumped all over this and made my life a living hell for awhile. So I ran some reports in SAP and put together a little presentation showing that over the previous 10 weeks over 91% of their orders were processed completely and available to them well before 3pm. And by the way, assholes? My department ended its shift at 4:30, our processing was completed by 4pm daily unless there were system issues which would account for the other 9% of their orders.

Now I'm not a big fan of being attacked like that. So to show my appreciation I pulled out 2 weeks of their picking reports and got the corresponding 2 weeks of the payroll bills from Bob's from our director (who was on our side) and proceeded to put together a report that indicated there were many, MANY fraudulent billing claims. In a nutshell I tore apart their reports and their payroll invoices over a 2 week period. What I discovered was that in that 2 week period there were almost 900...yes, 900...man hours they billed us for that were completely unaccounted for in their work report logs. And this was just in the picking department, I didn't even look at any other departments. That came out to roughly $18,000 they falsely billed us for over 2 weeks. And being that our upper management was already on the hook for this, that report got buried REAL quick. I was told by our director that when he gave it to his boss (the evil bitch orchestrating this whole thing) she literally turned pale and grabbed the paperwork and stormed out of his office. And nothing ever came from that of course, but they backed off a little.

I should also add that as a bonus, once our director saw those reports he refused to sign off on any of Bob's payroll submissions from that day forward.  He made the evil bitch approve all of it.  :)

Ok that was a lot of backstory. In the interest of not making this any longer I'll blog tomorrow about the decision I was faced with yesterday. But this backstory was necessary for tomorrow's story to make sense. :)