Reporting Function Found To Have Operated Without Human Involvement For Six Years
An internal software licence review at a national fastenings distributor has established that the group's depot reporting has been produced automatically since 2019, and that nobody at the company can say how.
News Intro
A national distributor of industrial fastenings has confirmed that the daily and weekly performance reports used across its eleven depots have been produced without human involvement since November 2019, and that until six weeks ago nobody in the business was aware of it.
The reports have never been late. In six years they have missed one working morning, during a power interruption at the head office in 2023, and arrived the following day with the gap noted at the top of the first page.
The company's finance director described the reports in a written statement as "a genuinely reliable part of an otherwise mixed picture", and confirmed that their figures had been used in depot bonus calculations, in a supplier rebate claim submitted in 2024, and in three sets of accounts.
The analyst named in the footer of every report has been employed by the business since 2016. He remains employed. The company has been unable to establish what he does.
The £190 Licence
The matter did not come to light through a performance concern, an audit finding or a complaint.
It came to light because a procurement assistant, working through a schedule of recurring software payments, found an annual renewal of £190 for a job scheduling tool that no department claimed, no manager had approved, and no policy document mentioned.
The licence was traced to a cost centre for a team that had not existed since 2021. The payment card behind it belonged to a manager who left the business in 2022. The renewal had gone through six times.
When procurement asked what the tool was scheduling, nobody could answer. The IT function confirmed the tool was running, confirmed it had been running continuously for approximately six years, and confirmed that its scheduled tasks were held on a machine that was not on the company's asset register.
The tasks were named. There were fourteen of them. Twelve were named after reports the business receives every morning.
The Analyst's Account
The following is taken from a written account provided to this newspaper.
I would like to correct one thing at the start, because it has been put to me twice now in the wrong order. I did not hide anything. There was no form for it.
I joined in 2016 as one of four reporting analysts. The job as it was then was eleven separate extracts, pasted into a workbook, checked, formatted, and sent out before nine. It took roughly five hours a day and about forty minutes of that was thinking. The rest of it was moving numbers from one place to another place while being careful.
In 2018 the old stock system was retired and everything moved. I rebuilt my extracts because I had to. Once they were rebuilt they were in a form where they could run themselves, so in November 2019 I made them run themselves.
That is the whole event. It took nine days. I have never described it as a project because it was not one.
People have focused on the timing. The reports could go out at four in the morning. They do not. They are held and released at 08:52, because a report that arrives at three in the morning invites a question, and a report that arrives at 08:52 arrives when a person would send it. I set that deliberately. I have thought about whether that was dishonest and my honest answer is that it was considerate.
They have also focused on the errors. Not wrong numbers. Small human things. Once every few weeks the covering line varies, or a column heading is not quite aligned, or the week commencing date is written in a different format. Two of those are on a rota. I put them in because eleven identical documents a week for six years looks like a machine, and once anybody thinks it is a machine, the conversation stops being about the reports.
I was not asked about any of this in six years. I was asked for things, and I should be accurate about that. I logged every request. Between 2020 and this June I received forty-nine requests for ad hoc analysis, and I did all forty-nine of them myself, by hand, usually within the day, and eleven of those went into board packs. So the notion that has been going round the building that I have been sitting at an empty desk is not supported by anything.
What I did not do is tell anybody that the daily reporting had stopped requiring me, because nobody at any point asked me whether the daily reporting required me. My appraisal asked whether I had met my objectives. My objectives were the reports. The reports went out.
I was marked meets expectations in 2021, 2022 and 2023. In 2022 my development area was visibility.
In 2021 the team went from four analysts to two. The reason given was demonstrated throughput per head, which had improved considerably, and I was one of the two who stayed. One of the two who did not stay was the man who sat behind me and showed me, in 2017, how to schedule a task so it runs without you. He was fifty-eight. He had a leaving card and I signed it.
I have been asked whether I feel responsible for that. I have thought about it more than anybody in that building would credit. But I did not set the headcount and I did not present the throughput figures. I produced the report the throughput figures came from.
What The Overnight Does
The company's review has established that the fourteen scheduled tasks — known to the analyst as "the overnight" — do more than assemble reports.
Two of them write directly into a spreadsheet used to calculate depot manager bonuses. One reconciles delivery volumes against a supplier agreement and produces the figure entered on the group's annual rebate claim, a claim worth £214,000 in 2024. One populates a summary that has appeared, in the same format, in every board pack since March 2020.
None of the fourteen tasks is documented. Six of them reference a folder structure that was renamed in 2022 and continue to work because a redirection was put in place, by the analyst, on the day of the rename, at 07:15.
The scripts were written on a personal laptop, at home, in 2019. The laptop has never been on the company network. It remains, according to the analyst, "in a drawer, plugged in, and I check it".
The review's interim finding is that the company does not currently possess the ability to produce its own depot reporting.
The Ownership Question
The reporting is the company's. The figures are the company's. Whether the instrument that produces them is the company's is a question the company should be very careful about asking out loud, because the answer depends on documents signed in 2016 that I am told cannot presently be located, and on where a man was sitting when he wrote something in 2019. My advice to any business in this position is to negotiate, not to establish rights. Establishing rights is how you find out you do not have them.
The Job Description
The review requested the analyst's job description in order to assess the role against what the role had been doing.
The document returned by the HR system was last amended in September 2017. It describes the extraction and preparation of eleven reports from the group's stock management platform, and lists proficiency in that platform as an essential requirement.
The platform was decommissioned in 2018.
Under the heading "Key Relationships", the description names a line manager who left in 2022, a reporting team of four, and a weekly analyst meeting. The meeting was last held in March 2020.
The Retention Offer
The company has offered the analyst a new title, Reporting Systems Owner, a salary increase of £6,200, and a retention payment conditional on the full documentation of the overnight by the end of the financial year.
He has accepted. He told this newspaper that he was pleased the work had been recognised, that documentation was overdue, and that he had already begun.
Asked whether he understood that a fully documented system no longer requires the only person who understands it, he said he had assumed the question would come up eventually and that he was not going to pretend the thought had never occurred to him.
Asked, finally, whether the reports had ever been wrong, he said once.
In April 2022 a depot in the north-west was closed and its stock redistributed. The overnight had no instruction covering closure, so it continued to report the depot, drawing on the last figures it had, week after week, in the same format, released at 08:52.
Nobody queried it for five months. The depot appeared in two quarterly summaries and in one board pack, where its performance was described, in a bullet point beneath the table, as steady.
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