The week that wouldn't end

Well... I finally had a day off, and it was delicious.

I've been pretty hard to come by for the last week because I was working some pretty late hours. You see, my company recently took over inventory management and order processing for a large Foodservice brokerage. Basically, we order food from packers, put it in warehouses, then redistribute to smaller warehouses across the country so that your local Olive Garden can purchase delicious frozen fruits and vegetables. Basically, we are pushing the paperwork, dealing with problems, and making sure there is always enough inventory to go around.

It's a simple concept, but everything came crashing down around us on Monday.

Wait, let me back up and say that I had to come in last Sunday because I had to load the inventory for the four warehouses we manage into our database or "virtual warehouse". Let me also say that the boobs at one of our warehouses sent me a .pdf of their inventory to load in our database. The_Dude is already really pissed off, but for those of you that are not quite as tech savvy: pdf files are great for designers because they have infinite resolution, pdf files are terrible for databases because all you can do with them is print them out. So, all 67 pages of inventory had to be hand entered (by me) into excel so a consultant we hired can dump it into our database.

Monday: we start taking orders and our world came crashing down. EDI was not working the way we wanted to so we had to immediately resort to paper orders and hand-entering. This was not totally unanticipated but it was not prepared for adequately. We didn't lose any orders, but we did end up entering quite a few orders more than once because there wasn't an organized system, which was very frustrating. I don't blame the customer service reps because they were just rolling with the punches, doing what they were instructed to do. The was definitely a management gap, but I'm not going to get into who I think wasn't pulling their end.

Now, let's throw in the fact that our customers had not been able to order for a week because of the transition from one company to the next, so the volume was twice what it normally would be. And also throw in the fact that there was a huge oversight before startup and 2,400 pricing records had to be loaded the morning of go-live (which was a shortcoming totally outside the bounds of my company, aka our customers fault). So, every time our CSR's tried to enter an order, it couldn't be completed because we had no pricing for the item for that customer.

I could go on for 2,000 words everything that went wrong and the lessons I learned, but I digress.

The fact is that I had a really good time. I took alot of joy in my work for a variety of different reasons. First, it was fun to get all the people in my division together to get the job done. Second, I work with some good people that managed to keep a good attitude in spite of the long hours. Third, I made it a point to make myself available to anyone that had questions (and actually spent two days as the resident problem solver, hashing out bugs and issues all day for the CSRs). I also tried to take work off their desk whenever I could and help them deal with more difficult issues. I was there to serve, and it made all the difference in the world. That being said, I hope to God that this week isn't like last, because I can't keep up that kind of pace.

Grand Totals:
Number of Days worked: 7
Nights spent in a hotel near my work: 2
Number of hours spent working: 97