Double ordered for over £40k - can the world swallow me please

[thepenguinsaysno]

NC as I if my boss is on here she'll know it's me, HI!

AWWWWW Crab cakes. I duplicated a really large purchase order. My 'big' boss emailed me asking for a purchase order for '20 pieces of stuff we need" to be sent to a supplier for about 40k, I did it that day.

A week later my manager send me another email saying don't forget this PO. And it was a different email thread with the words "new order as follows: 20 pieces of stuff we need"

I didn't cop it was the same stuff so sent it to the supplier, who has now made both order.

To make it worse big boss asked me a few weeks ago, was there a duplication. He asked both me and the supplier. Neither of us replied. Which is very unlike me and I can't remember why.

I haven't liked and admitted I made a mistake with doing both order. It's the first big mistake I've made in this job, been here over 2 years. I hope big boss doesn't lose all faith in me

To the pp who dared to ask what is a crab cake….it’s the food of the gods.

I thought you’d ordered crab cakes as well. Honestly just swear, no-one would have thought you’d ordered 40k of fucks (although that is how many fucks I am not giving in my life at the moment 😁)

This!!

This thread honestly has made me howl
with the crabbiness.

Let the swear words free op!

Hmm. It seems like the email from the big boss was asking something of the supplier. Did it have a direct action on for you to respond to? Or is it possible you read it and thought that you would wait and see what the supplier said? If you were to reply what would you have said about what is on order? It sounds like it would have been along the lines of “I cannot confirm what is on order but I can confirm there are two separate purchase orders” which the boss already knew. I can see why you might not have replied at that point, though it would have been good to follow up with the company.

it’s not ideal if you don’t reply, but there is also an onus on your boss to chase. Often leaders don’t think about how clear the ask is on the person they are emailing and so the boss could think about making more clear who he intends to answer the question when there is more than one recipient. Were you in the to or the cc field? (And people use these wrong so it’s not a fail safe).

also how significant is £40k to the business? Is it very large or about average?

from my pov, I think multiple people/a process has failed so my focus would be on how we stop it happening again. I wouldn’t be rushing to blame you.

Hope that helps. I’m a senior leader with budgetary control at a company with £200m/year revenue.

Lol this one made me laugh out loud,

I hope OP that all is well and you’re able to laugh along with us.

I have recently been trying to reign in my swearing as we have gorgeous little ones visiting and therefore I’m joining you in the Awwwww crab cakes club! And I’ll definitely use Newport Pagnell as a backup, I remember once sitting there for EVER in a traffic jam.

Yep. When I first started at work (huge multinational manufacturing company) 20 odd years back I was asked to take a week to see if I could trace what had happened to all the aged balances they couldn’t reconcile on a sales ledger for one time customers. It had €3MM of unpaid invoices. I found matching payments written off for some, open credit notes on a different ledger for a few and contracted customers and got payments for about 1/3. At the end of the week there was around €650k left unaccounted for and we were told to just write it off because that was sufficiently immaterial they weren’t investing the time of someone who knew more about the work processes/systems. We have much better controls now but they’d still be fairly relaxed about this kind of mistake and would class it as a process issue

One of those things! You could have caught it but didn’t. Your supplier may have caught it - but didn’t. With unusual orders like that I would have double checked with you -but my asst probably wouldn’t have.
may leastbits something you can use!

Yes, 40,000 of them! 😄

Looks like you've been caught..... red-handed

I'll eat it. Seriously. Just if you need to destroy the evidence or anything. I know it's a lot of crab cakes but that's my problem okay?

Be careful of freezing crab unless you know how to defrost them properly. Have you ever watched Gordon Ramsay to Hell and back - USA! He always says it's alright to make mistakes, it's what you do after that matters. As long as you learn from them and make sure you never make the same mistake again then you're good 👍

My worst was getting a Zero in the wrong place and lumbering our warehouse with 9000 more than we needed at a cost to the company of £120k or so though we did get rid of them but it took 3 years to run that stock down! Money recouped obvs and then some as we sold the product at a large mark up but the warehouse were less than impressed at the space taken up…

@thepenguinsaysno I recently saw the Booker Prize menu on social media and although i know you said it's just an expression, I still did wonder if your over-ordering meant you were responsible for this!!

Sharing in case it makes you smile (it gave me a giggle!)

@MorphandMindy

...Pompidou?

( IYKYK)

Good amount of crab on that menu 😁

All has worked out fine with the stock too