If at first you don't succeed

Last Friday was stock take day at work. We do a stock take every three months (which isn't so bad, it used to be every two months). The company I work for is in the business of manufacturing pairs of glasses, so there are three basic types of stock item - frames, lenses, and accessories (cleaning cloths and cords etc).

Four or five years ago we used to have one big computer system that handled everything, order entry, manufacturing, stock, the lot. Then we decided to split out all the separate functions and use systems from different companies which specialised in those particular areas. As a result we now have three separate stock take procedures for the three different types of stock. It's all a bit of a mess and I was much more confident handling the stock take procedure when it was all part of one big system that I understood. Now I have to print out a set of instructions every time, follow them like a monkey, and if it goes wrong I haven't really got a clue where to look.

The lens stock take went wrong on Friday. For some unknown reason the previous stock figures were not cleared down properly, so after three people had spent all afternoon entering the new figures, we looked at the totals and saw that they were all over the place. No-one was in the mood to look at it at ten to five on a Friday afternoon, and we didn't really know what to do to fix it anyway, so we did the lens stock take all over again this morning.

However we were able to get all hands on deck (well, nine pairs of hands) so it only took an hour to re-enter all the data. Why it went wrong on Friday I'll never know. What I do know is that this isn't the first time this has happened, and I'm dreading the next stock take, which will be on the first day back at work after the Christmas break. Oh joy.

At least I'm not the guy in the firing line any more!