Overtime: Phase Two

I wish I could walk through my workplace with a camera.  Unfortunately, that is not possible where I work, due to the owners' personal policies on liability and privacy.

This has been a strange week.  Actually, it started last week--On Wednesday.  That was the day we stopped production and started the inventory-to-end-all-inventories.  Although production did resume the following day, it was considerably limited.  The only work that has been done since that time has been things that needed to be done.  The CNC section, that part of our shop that runs several computer-operated mills, has always been pushed to the limit, so they are one of the areas that resumed the following day.  The only other stuff that has been done has been sporadic work to support the CNC functions, such as shearing additional sheet metal when they needed it, or something of that nature.

All week long, all over the center of the shop, there have been guys dissecting piles of materials, carefully breaking down the stacks and racks of sheet materials and extrusions--Much of it long untouched.  Poring over multiple sheets of paper, comparing, measuring, and trying to find correlations between the actual items & their lot numbers and the paper listings.  There are piles of sheet metal and stacks of extrusions everywhere you look.  It's a slow, tedious job, and it's made even worse by the years of nasty dark, oily dust that coats everything in the building.  This is the activity that I wanted to take pictures of.

My job was much the same.  For most of the last several days I was involved in the same elaborate counting game.  The first couple of days of counting had my in my area of control--The "standards".  Standards are all the little packages of hardware that we use on assemblies, such as rivets, nutplates, screws, and things like that.  There are hundreds of little bags of these things that I maintain, and all of them had to be counted and noted.  After a few days of that it became apparent that the people doing the inventory of the finished goods we stock upstairs needed major help, and I was recruited to help up there until it was finished.  That took several people several days to complete (including Saturday).  When that was finished, I went back and finished my count of the little hardware, which took several more days.

All this time, new material items still arrived.  Carefully stacked in the area near my desk, they sat untouched by me until yesterday, when I was finally given the "green light" to start receiving things in.  Stipulations were in place though--I can only receive in things that arrived before April 1st, and even those things can't physically move from the check-in area lest they end up mixing in with stock that has already been counted and noted on someone's sheet somewhere.  The whole idea is to maintain the inventory "placeholder" they have created while still allowing it to move a little where it needs to (if that makes sense).  My inbox is now over 7 inches tall (I actually measured it yesterday).  It has never been close to that before.  That doesn't even include several small items that have come in UPS or similar that are stacked around behind me in my office area that also need to be "received" in.

The overtime for inventory reasons looks to be finally over even though there are still pockets of employees that are still counting and marking things.

Now the overtime to play catch-up is about to start.