[purenuman]

Originally Posted by Escapee

The big problem is the spares held in he region will be returned to a central location, this means the part to put an area back on service possibly affecting a few thousand customers will be in the hands of a parcel firm and a stores located hundreds of miles away. Also an engineer very often wants to look at a piece of gear to make sure its the right part, there are so many different bits of kit of various vintage even at regional level. I can just imagine the wrong part being delivered x amount of hours after the engineer has requested it, I think this decision has been made to cut cost because regions have not been allowed to order spares or even able to get faulty gear repaired in many instances.

Imagine an engineer at 2am in the morning diagnosing a fault and then having to get a parcel firm to deliver the required part, or I guess the same could happen at peak veiwing times during a large sporting event. I can see the reason behind the central stores for stock/consumable items, but I find a central stores for maintenance spares very hard to believe.

I think this is another great idea from the bean counters to cut cost and put further stress on an already fed up team at the sharp end.

I know all about the logistics of an operation like this, and problems of.

Just trying to explain what they may be trying to achieve and nobody can say it won't work until they know exactly what NTLs plans are (If they are more than rumour)...

An efficiently run parts delivery system with everything else being reorganised to fit around it will be better than many thousands of pounds worth of parts permanently on the road when each engineer will only need a small percentage of it on a daily/weekly basis. Many large companies are doing similar things....

Remember nobody has any idea how this would work or if it is going to happen....... It would be very easy to presume ordered parts would arrive 'Next Day' or so, but remember DHL have a huge network of buildings with vehicles permanently on the move..... We can all guess but why can't we be optimistic??

One of the biggest obstacles to dragging a company like NTL in to the real world and make them efficient is the 'It'll never work', 'It always goes wrong' and 'They don't know what they are dong' attitude without even considering the positive aspects of what is trying to be achieved.....

I've seen many a company (admittedly much smaller than NTL) fail spectacularly because the staff resisted change without even understanding what was going on....... I'm not saying that is the way people at NTL are .... just that change should not be dismissed because a rough outline of a plan sounds wrong, less efficient or harder work.
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Originally Posted by Escapee

Some regions are desaperately short of spare equipment, and this is their only answer.

While engineers in other areas are driving round with one in their hoard...??