Christopher Lara, March 11, 2016

                Today’s job was simple and clear- cycle counting. It’s the world’s most interesting task, but also the most tedious. It consists of taking inventory of the tools and parts that are in lots in what we call the cage. The cage is a small room in the shop that stores a great amount of surplus material for Ideal Surplus. There are as many boxes as there are fish in a lake, so this project will be running for a bit of time. The difficult part is searching the list for the item number on the tool, which can take several minutes if you have many pages to look through. Sometimes I double and triple check because I felt that I messed up or remembered the wrong number to look up. Many times, the part in the box isn’t on the list, so you have to take it out of the lot and put it to the side; however, if that part was on the list and it was human error when looking up the number, it can have serious problems down the road. This reason can be a critical flaw in the system down the road which is the reason I check for the part number so many times.

                The interesting part is that someone had to put in all these numbers and parts to begin with. How could the inventory be left unmanaged or unchecked for so long? Why was no one revisiting the parts for so many lots? I believe that although these questions brought up while working on this are critiquing someone’s work, they also help provide reasoning for fixing previous mistakes. I’m sure that Setech and Surplus are thinking, “How can we keep up a quick and efficient inventory system that won’t transform into the way it once was?” Even while doing a tedious job like cycle counting, you become inspired to suggest changes and better ideas to improve a previous task.