CopyTracker
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True story. A company I used to work for had these big, high-production
Xerox copiers on every floor of it's building in a set location. The
original idea was, I suppose, to increase overall efficiency by having
production-quality copiers available for all departments to share,
eliminating the hassle of having every department buy and maintain its own
copiers, etc, and lowering overall costs. Reasonable idea, I guess. But
after a while, the company started to suspect that either costs weren't being
allocated fairly, or people were doing too much 'personal' copying (I assume
that means copying things for personal use, not copying "personal" things -- but what do I know?). Anyway, one day we showed up for work and posted
all over the walls (hey, who paid for those copies, anyway?) was a notice
announcing the arrival of a new system, (let's call it) CopyTracker, which
was projected to reduce overall copying costs by as much as 20%. It was a simple
system; if you wanted to make copies you first had to swipe your employee
badge through a card reader, and big brother would keep track of every
employee's copy count and frequency and god-knows-what. Not really that much
of a big deal, except..... it rarely worked. Either cards wouldn't swipe
correctly, or there would be some communications problem among the readers
and the central big-brother computer, or some other technical problem.
The bottom line? Copy count went down by quite a bit more than 20%, because
half the time people couldn't copy what they needed copied. Big success,
exceeded expectations (50% reduction in direct copying costs instead of the
projected 20%). But a couple of other things happened. First, people were
really pissed. It just took longer to get things done. Second, enlightened
Department Heads started buying copiers for their departments, to avoid the
hassle of using the broken central system. Net result? Overall the company
scored both a productivity decrease and a direct cost increase. Then, the solution arrived. One day we showed up for work and posted all over the walls were notices announcing the CopyTracker system had been removed, with an expected 30% cost reduction. Cool! Save 20% by putting it in, save an additional 30% by taking it out (overall, save 44% -- do your own math). My suggestion at the time was we should wait a month, put it back in, then take it out again, and so on. Pretty soon we'd be making money with every copy! Just a side note -- these guys should have read my first essay in this series, Don't Do Stupid Things. Hmm, was this company stupider-than-average, or does this sort of thing happen everywhere? (Well, there's always the possibility both are true). My experience is this sort of thing happens a lot. Take stock analysts: I once worked for a company that had gone about 7 years since its inception with net profit every quarter and year-by-year 100% revenue growth. Great IPO, life was good. Then some reality set in, growth slowed a bit, the stock price fell from the mid-50s to the mid-20s. Five analysts were following the stock, three "strong buys" and two "buys." Then the bottom fell out; a big expected contract fell through, the market got wind of it, and the stock price fell in an hour down to under $4. By the next day, two of the analysts had downgraded the stock to "hold" or worse. Hmm, so you were supposed to buy the stock at $26, and then when it went down to 4 bucks, you were supposed to sell it. Now I see why those guys get the big bonuses. That is much more complicated than the buy-low-sell-high scheme. Hell, I can make investment decisions like that on my own, thank-you-very-much. (By the way, the company was sold 2 years later for about $20 a share). Email comments/opinions/examples to me.
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