From: Ryan Gill (rmgill@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Aug 24 2005 - 10:44:10 PDT
At 11:11 AM -0600 8/24/05, Hutterer, John (MPAU) wrote:
>Sonny,
>
>The Property Book works well...in theory. I spent almost 27 years in the
>Army and I have seen dozens of situations where things fell through the
>cracks. Examples: a WWI Ration Breakdown Kit, in perfect condition, that
>sat in an S4 store-room for years before the PBO decided to turn it in,
>and then realized that it wasn't on the books; a deuce that I personally
>turned in that got "lost" in the Motor Pool for two years; a UH1D Huey
>helicopter that was left at a post for maintenance and not picked up for
>two years. The PBO had lost track of it and forgotten that it existed.
>The Army has a system for handling things like this. They call them
>"found on post". I have seen instances where things like water buffalos,
>trucks, generators, and jeeps have been picked up by an enterprising PBO
>as "found on post" and no questions are ever asked. I would not be
>surprised if many of the 32,000 "missing" vehicles could be accounted
>for in this way, if only there was a way of tracking them. I know that
>Property Books are now computerized, but I wonder if anyone has ever
>tried to write a program that would sort through the millions of lines
>of information to see if what a PBO says that he has is what he is
>actually supposed to have. This is going to be an even bigger headache
>when stuff starts coming back from Iraq.
Any kind of inventory tracking like this takes people that are consistent in their logging of changes, consistent in their adherence to the process for making changes and a repeatable inventory system that is fast and doesn't get dropped.
We've had one bright and Bushy tailed guy here who's managed to inventory our entire quantity of servers that we use for production of CNN and all the various other web sites we serve and produce. It's a huge amount of servers, not all belong to us but we run them. We have assets that move around constantly to cover service peaks and new projects and development. He's built a simple barcode system that allows him or anyone else to inventory our 4 data centers in about an hour and track for location changes.
If the asset isn't tracked as having moved and you don't know that it's moved, it ends up lost. Until this guy started doing this we had servers that had been sitting idle in racks for months or more because someone else had removed a service but never updated the sheets relating to it. Times when we could have really used the server for capacity spikes at odd times.
I suspect that unless the S4 types get their brains in gear and really sort out a simple system and are consistent with out being asshats at the same time, the Army will always have missing assets. Of course, that doens't include instances where someone tries to game the system and remove things on the sly....
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