The illustration above about using a personal credit card to expedite a Digi-Key order hit way too close to home, and it seems relatively common. To put some numbers on it, let's say an engineer with a burdened cost of $100,000 per year works on a project with an expected budget of $1,000,000. An order of $100 is necessary to move a key part of the design forward.
So suppose it's Wednesday the 1st at 5:30 PM and to expedite an issue you want to make a Next Day Digi-Key order for delivery on Thursday the 2nd. The boss left at 5:00 PM, and he as the one credit card for the group. So it's entered by 6:00 PM but it won't get processed anyway until the next day because Purchasing leaves at 4:00 PM. But then it doesn't get processed because the purchaser took Friday the 3rd off, so now it doesn't get ordered until Monday the 6th, but they did 3-day delivery instead of next day, making it arrive on Friday the 10th.
Did this save any money anywhere in the process? What is the value of expediting blocking processes like that? Would a $1000 credit card per engineer be worth while? The liability on a $1000 credit card is... $1000. With an engineer who is answerable to what is purchased, so ordering cookies or golf balls probably won't happen. What is the liability of a week of delay? $10,000?
Look at all the relative orders of magnitude here. The little tasks get in the way large responsibilities, like priority inversion in some embedded system.
Imagine this.... (I lived it)The year is 2013. I'm the lead industrial engineer for the largest rift and quartered hardwood sawmill in the United States. We're in the middle of trying to turn the mill around after some crazy mismanagement by previous owners -- the bank had taken over the mill, and an investment firm had since bought it from the bank. We needed production of at least 61,000 BFD per day. The mill was at 14,000 - 18,000 BFD when I was brought in to turn it around.
I started going through all of the operations to see what was going on. An entire planing mill was down, but why? They were out of $0.11 bulbs for the Optical Comparator used to sharpen the planer knives and nobody cared enough to let someone higher up know. An 11 cent bulb was costing $120k / day in lost production. I ordered a box of 100, stocked 10 in the supply cabinet by the comparator, and put the remaining 90 in the designated area in maintenance storage. Total cost: $11.70 delivered.
Next, the sawmill was having trouble keeping blades sharp. It was basically a giant bandsaw mill -- the blades were about 30 feet in diameter, about 1/8" thick, and 8-10" across. What was the problem? Apparently some of the control boards for the automatic sharpener had let out their magic pixies and so the machine had to be manually operated because there was no limit function or reset working. The part was obsolete, but I managed to find one and had it overnighted. Total cost: $271.86 shipped.
Meanwhile, I had the dead board sent to my office. I rebuilt it, made a new version in Eagle, and was ready to order new PCBs to have on stand-by.
So, for $283.56 I brought mill production from 15,000 BFD to 45,000 BFD. In other words, that investment made back $90,000 in lost productivity.... PER DAY.
I put together a massive SQL system to make it easier to run reports and track production, and had brought production back to 58,000 BFD when they sacked me for "spending too much money". I had spent just over $800 to get to this point. That $800 total earned back $129,000 in losses per day. But hey, I was spending too much money. They're virtually bankrupt now. Production is only a few thousand BFD a month now.