...some genius back in the days when we did everything by hand whilst using a desktop calculator decided that we were wasting time and money calculating product costs to 4 decimal places. This was in a business where a tenth of a cent was actually significant. They told us that in the future in order to save time and money we should only use 3 decimal places. All of our programs on the mainframe were set up for 4 decimal places so we were to put a zero in the 4th decimal spot.

Whoever made this decision had apparently never noticed that our calculators - all a standard model - did not have a setting for 3 decimal places, so we actually were adding a small step to round the numbers manually. Either way, we still took the same number of steps to do the calculations even if our calculators had been capable.

I tried to explain this to my supervisor but hit a brick wall until I had a stroke of genius. I went back to my desk, grabbed my calculator, returned to his office and asked him to demonstrate the savings. The 3 digit policy died immediately.

In the same vein, many years later someone in our corporate offices decided to copy a process they found on a Purchasing best practice website where vendors would stock our shelves under some agreed-upon prices and we would pay them without a Purchase Order and it was supposed to save us money. They stuck the process in without working the details out with anyone who knew about how our systems worked nor how the vendor systems worked. It was a huge disaster and I was spending a lot of time and overtime trying to match their invoices to our payments for multiple plants and to make prices match since the vendor's own Accounting personnel and systems were not capable of making the process work nor were ours. After over a year and huge amounts of problems I literally stormed into a meeting and told Purchasing they either had to take on the large task of matching purchases to invoices or dump the system. I got backing from corporate accounting and the whole thing went back to regular PO's and invoices. All they really did was move a routine task that worked seamlessly into a major accounting issue for multiple companies.