Saturday, January 30, 2021

Management Pays Rent On Equipment, Wastes Tens of Thousands


Anyone who's ever been tempted by anything at Rent-A-Center has done the math and decided it's a stupid idea to rent a TV, so why are corporate big wigs getting away with the business version of the same thing? It seems like almost anyone would be better at budgeting than these suits. For another genius move by management, here's a time management illegally banned overtime pay and IT got it all back.

1.

Text - Posted by u/calladus 2 days ago 97 3 6 "The $15,000 equipment is too expensive for your department to purchase. Why don't you just rent it for $48,000 a year?" oc M Back in the days when 33.6kbps modems were hot shit, I worked for the engineering department of a growing company. This company had started small. It was privately owned, and the VPs had all put in a portion of their own money to start the company. By this time in the story, they were finally making a respectable 30-40 million

2.

Text - Our engineering department was designing circuit boards with embedded computer systems. And to program these, instead of soldering the microcomputer to the board, we would solder on a microcontroller socket, and then plug in an "In Circuit Emulator" that would pretend it was a microcontroller, and allow the programmer to create the required program. This In Circuit Emulator, or ICE, was made by Hitachi. It plugged into a free PCI slot on your PC, and had a ribbon cable that would attach t

3.

Text - And we were renting it. It cost $4,000 a month. The first month we had it, our CTO and Marketing VP planned our whole new product line around this family of microcontrollers. So, at the end of the month, us engineers ask management to buy this for us. Since we would be using it for a while. The Engineering VP saw the price tag, and told us to just rent it. Surely we would be done with it soon. Engineers, being practical, forgot about the objection and just put our noses to the wheel. The

4.

Text - After a year, the VP of Finance asked about this recurring contract line item. They called the engineer who had originally started the contract. The engineer helpfully forwarded the approval from the Engineering VP, and his later email asking to buy it, and the VP's reply where he demurred. By the end of the week, this toy was ours. Along with a second one, since finance determined that product rollout was being affected by not enough access to the equipment. Hitachi just gave us the firs

5.

Text - Downtown_Let 2 days ago Some companies are really stupid on this kind of thing. One company I worked at there was a simple tool that was only used by a few departments, but cost about $50. Our department wanted to buy one as it often wasted a lot of time locating it and retrieving it from another department, but company forced a long winded procurement process and deemed it wasteful to have two when they were rarely used. Over just a few weeks you ended up having highly paid engineers ear

6.

Text - goddessabove 2 days ago Reminds me of the company I work for. Our store had trailers in the back of the store for excess freight and fixtures. Company decides they no longer want any trailers. We had five or ten trailers that the company we would rent extras from during peak times would actually pay the store to allow to stay on our property. Store manager said they had to go. Lost out on income, and now pay $4,000 a month for each of the 30 or so trailers we rent from october to January.

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