
Ask HN: Have you ever saved your employer big money through simple change? - sw1205
I work for a large company and recently came up with an idea that saved the company around 75k (pounds) a year - not a huge saving but for what the change is and the effort involved it was.<p>I work in an office and I have to lock my machine when I go away from my desk. 15 minutes after I lock my machine a screensaver kicks in showing all things bank related and after a further half hour the monitor goes into standby. One morning, after being horribly hungover, I noticed that in my vicinity around 25 machines all had screensavers on (the team adjacent to mine were in a meeting). This got me to thinking how much money and energy was being wasted by screensavers alone.<p>So after speaking to some people and doing various presentations (it's amazing how convulated the process is to change something simple!) it was agreed the company branded screen saver was to be replaced for a blank one (this was needed to ensure the machine was put into lock mode) and monitor standby initiated 44 minutes earlier than the original configuration.  This saves 44 minutes of power at 35 watts, where previously the monitor would display a company branded screen saver.  With over 100,000 desktops in the estate, this saved energy costs when the PC is not in use in the region of £75k p.a.<p>From a technical perspective this was a simple, low risk change to implement and was delivered on time and with zero budget (aside from platform development man hours).<p>I wondered if anyone else had saved money through simple change? If you work for a large company you may also want to ask the question 'do we need a screensaver'!<p>Would love to hear some of the ways you have saved money for your company!
======
edw519
Many times. A few of my favorites:

\- We upgraded our hardware and our forecasting software vendor wanted a one
time $600,000 charge. I convinced my boss to replace them with in-house
written software. Took 6 weeks to write.

\- Our 400 worker factory was $30,000 under-absorbed per month. I wrote both
standard costing and data collection software. Supervisors compared the
standards to the actuals to discover where they were losing money. We were
over-absorbed by $30,000 per month 6 months later.

\- We budgeted over $1 million for a new ERP system to "solve all of our
problems". I helped others solve most of their problems by identifying them
and coming up with solutions from the existing software. We never did buy new
software.

\- (My favorite). Our HCFA feed from the U.S. Government was broken and no one
knew why. I dug in and changed 1 byte of code (1 byte, not 1 line). The next
day, our bank account had $6.5 million more in it. I never had the heart to
tell them how easy it was to fix.

~~~
danilocampos
> I dug in and changed 1 byte of code (1 byte, not 1 line). The next day, our
> bank account had $6.5 million more in it.

That's just gangsta. Can you expand on that last story? I can't wrap my head
around such a simple problem costing so much.

~~~
edw519
HCFA issued a bulletin (as it often does) about its upcoming file layout
changes but no one bothered to read it. They changed one line code from "SA"
to "SK" or something like that. The change took effect, but since no one
applied the mod, the money stopped. Three months later, I was brought in to
fix it. I just read the bulletin, changed the hard code, and promoted it. I
still can't believe they were that incompetent (and one of the many reasons
I'll have nothing to do with health care any more.)

------
kls
I took the CTO position at a company AccessUSA now HotelBeds which is a travel
consolidator, they had a very old system built on fox-pro for the reservation
system. The original developer had pretty much abandoned any updates to the
system and was just sucking licensing revenue out of it. It was a totally
closed system, so it could not be modified from an external development team
and all advances made towards the original developer met luke warm responses.

Several consultants had came in and told the CEO that there was no way to
graduate out of the system, that it would require a total rewrite of the
system. The CEO had went through 3 failed attempts to build a new system with
external vendors the second of which folded shop and then the CEO got a call
from an Indian company saying that they had been working on the system for
over a year and had not goten paid. Apparently the front company that folded
was subbing everything to offshore firms without letting the customer know.

Anyway, all attempts failed and the one most critical business issue was that
the rates and allotments for hotel rooms needed to be available to customers
like Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Expedia in real time. It was a read only
problem. I set up an export from fox-pro to a database cluster (I can't ever
remember which one now (Oracle or MSSQL). Built some web services on top of it
to expose the data and published the WSDL. All tolled we (2 people full time)
spent a week building the services and added over 30 million in revenue, the
first year. I have done some others, but that is probably my best time to
money ratio of my career.

~~~
parenthesis
It's "all told", not "all tolled": <http://www.word-
detective.com/2008/04/11/all-told/>

~~~
kls
Who gives a crap, really the meaning was conveyed. I have serious writing
language disabilities, just take a look at my post history for the obvious
proof. Sniping me for grammer critique is like picking up the local bar
buzzard, not much of an accomplishment and not something you want to brag
about. I am low hanging fruit.

<http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/LBLD.htm>

~~~
parenthesis
I'm very sorry you took my comment as sniping; that wasn't my intention at
all.

I was pointing out the mistake because I found it to be a very _interesting_
mistake — as I hope is conveyed in the link I gave — nestling in your
otherwise exemplary written English. In fact, it caused me to momentarily
question whether it was _I_ who had got that idiom wrong for all these years.

~~~
kls
No problem, I jump the gun on this one a lot and I apologize for that, if it
was not your intent. I just get the crap beat out of me by grammer nazis all
the time and if I could fix the issue I would, but no amount of people
pointing it out is going to fix it. I have worked and worked at it for years
(it's one of the major reasons, I post). But just as I will never, no matter
how much I stive to, know my right from my left, or be able to accurately
estimate the elapse of time, I will also overlook and substitute wrong words
in written form. It's really, really frustrating to be intelligent with a
language disability and I get really pissy about it some times, for that I am
sorry.

------
chaosmachine
I once worked in an outsourced tech support call center for a top 3 US ISP.

One day we started receiving a massive flood of calls all about the same
problem: the default ISP homepage wouldn't load, and people thought their
internet was broken. The call queue was growing exponentially, and no one
could figure out what was wrong. This went on for a few hours, with no
solution in sight.

Long story short, while troubleshooting with one of these customers, I found
the source of the problem (a new firewall setting in the ISP's free av/fw
package), reported it to my supervisor, and a fix was quickly implemented.

Given the volume of calls and the size of their subscriber base, I probably
saved the ISP at least 5 digits in phone fees, and got a lot of angry
customers off their back.

For my efforts, I was rewarded with a company branded pen.

~~~
bsk
Good job. There's a similar story about then Russian president Putin. He
rewarded a Gazprom employee with a pen for saving the company about $5M a
year. Only that was a $150 000 pen.

~~~
fragmede
That sounds like an interesting story that I'd like to read, any links?
Google's not being helpful.

~~~
bsk
I've heard the story from a Russian guy whose father works at Gazprom.

------
midnightmonster
I saved a client tens of thousands of dollars per year by _not_ making a small
change.

The client had just had a customer service issue where one of their customers
discovered many months later that her card was still being charged for her
subscription even though the card had expired. She didn't know that many cards
continue to work after they expire, and had never bothered to cancel her
account.

So the client wanted me to make sure that we don't charge expired cards in the
future. As far as I knew, this was the first time the issue had come up in the
more than a year since we switched payment gateways, so I generated some new
reports, and it turns out they had charged almost $4,000 to expired cards just
in the previous month. Some of those customers would correct their card data
if we notified them, but the reality of subscription businesses is that
there's a lot of inertia involved. It's safe to say that the client would
simply lose a fair portion of those dollars every month if we stopped charging
expired cards with active subscriptions. Much better to refund the one
customer/year who complains that they thought an expired card meant they
unsubscribed than to forgo all that revenue. Of course they agreed and we
didn't make the change.

FTR, this is the same client that a few months ago was complaining that I was
the only programmer they'd ever worked with who bills them for email and phone
conversations. I'll be reminding them of this case if it ever comes up again.

~~~
variety
not exactly ethical, dipping into all these expired accounts. but what's that
got to do with anything?

~~~
dangrossman
It'd be unethical if they were canceled subscriptions, but these are active
subscriptions the customer never canceled... how is it unethical to continue
billing the customer as promised? Do you want your utility company to keep
track of your credit card expiration date and turn off your power when that
date arrives even though you haven't called to ask them to? I think the common
case is that when your card expires, you are issued another one with the same
number and a later expiration date, there's not even anything to update with
companies that stored your card for a subscription.

~~~
variety
Well, basic utility service isn't such a good comparator: in fact it's on the
opposite end of the spectrum from a magazine subscription (which is
essentially a fluff purchase, in the vast majority of consumer cases).

In fact with gas providers (or at least my own) are required to keep service
running even in the presence of events which might normally trigger a cancel
in other commercial contexts (customer in default for multiple months, not
reachable or even apparently "dead" according to public records, etc). At
least until the warm season starts.

Magazine subscriptions are at least in grey area, as far as this goes.

------
patio11
I can't tell you specifics yet since they haven't published (expecting it
sometime in November), but there is a client who will be something like six
figures richer twelve months from now on the strength of two content edits to
a ten year old blog post by their CEO. ("What do you _mean_ , the blog post
outranks the product for our most valuable keyword!?!?!?")

------
city41
When I joined my company the app I took over development for was hosted on
Amazon EC2 at about $700/month (Windows 2008). The app wasn't even done yet
and was being used by about 3 people, so I switched us over to shared hosting
at about $60/month. The shared hosting is even providing us better throughput
and the app is now noticably faster than when it was on Amazon; and I don't
have to worry about the details of securing/maintaining a Windows server box.
Not gigantic savings, but still $7600/year for basically no work at all isn't
too bad.

------
pmjordan
The internal level editor at a game developer I used to work for had a habit
of crashing. Lots. Something like 10-20x per day, per user. Starting it back
up and loading the level took more than 2 minutes, ignoring any lost unsaved
progress. Saving took some time, too, and risked crashing. The level editor
probably had around 30-40 users. (level designers and environment artists)
I'll leave working out the amount of lost time per day as an exercise to the
reader.

For some reason, fixing this situation was not a terribly high priority for
those in charge. Someone did create a crash reporter that emailed a stack dump
plus any user comments to a central email address. The quota for that account
was soon full.

I decided to spend an hour or two here or there on going through the crash
dumps. Within a week or so, I'd fixed the bugs causing 99% of the crashes.
After rolling that out, we were still getting tens of crashes a day. Fixing
90% of those was pretty easy, too. When I left the company, we were getting
maybe 2 crashes a week.

As you can probably imagine, this made me rather popular among some of the
artists and designers.

The editor was fairly ancient, they'd been using it for well over 5 years. I
can't begin to imagine how much effort was lost in total.

Incidentally, that sequence of events also cured my fear of large, horrible
code bases. This thing was written using a proprietary extension library to
MFC plus some creative use of DirectX. I think the only code that can scare me
now are life-or-death systems.

------
StavrosK
I worked in a construction/real estate company as IT support. The way they did
sales was they had a large excel file in which they wrote their leads every
day, and each day they had to send it to each of the other offices (over
dialup, it was a few MB) and sync the changes other people had made with
theirs.

I wrote a simple CRM web app in my spare time, which every salesperson in the
company just _loved_. It enabled them to see each client's history with a
single click.

I asked for a bonus, the manager waved me aside saying "sure, build it and
I'll give you $100". I never saw an extra dime other than the $5/hr I was
making (I probably earned them thousands in sales that would otherwise be
lost, not to mention productivity). They still use the system to this day.

~~~
pavel_lishin
This would be grossly unethical, but you could have intentionally broken it
and threatened to quit unless you got a raise or a bonus.

~~~
StavrosK
I could (and still can), but it would indeed be unethical...

~~~
iuguy
A more ethical alternative would be to write a CRM in your own time, quit then
offer to migrate them to your new one on the cheap in exchange for a case
study.

That way you bootstrap a startup, get a paying customer, they get dedicated
development (initially) centred around them and you don't have to work for
$5/hr.

------
SteveEvans
Not saved but made them more. As head of ecommerce for a travel company I
suggested small ux tweaks to their checkout process and they got a 25%
conversion uplift. Worth something ridiculous like £5m per year. Needless to
say I still got a poxy bonus which is why I now freelance :-)

~~~
sw1205
£5m per year! I am now almost embarassed to share my screensaver story! It is
amazing how people can make massive savings or generate huge revenue through
things that they themselves have done and not get rewarded for it. Companies
then wonder why they lose their best talent..

~~~
SteveEvans
What I find more amazing is that they'd lived with a booking process that just
didn't convert well for years and no one had ever questioned it. They just
spent more and more cash trying to raise traffic and traffic quality. Small
investment in the UX and they're in the money... (this is a big household name
holiday company in the UK).

~~~
kls
_What I find more amazing is that they'd lived with a booking process that
just didn't convert well for years and no one had ever questioned it._

A good UX developer are worth their weight in gold, it is just hard to get
people to recognize the difference between an HTML designer and a UX
professional that works with metrics, focus groups and A/B testing. They see
40hr for a designer and 200hr for a UX developer and they go with the
designer. When in reality they are separate and complimentary disciplines.

------
singlow
When I was a senior in High School I worked evenings at a call center fielding
extended warranty repair calls for a major retail chain. There were many calls
about older Macintosh computers that would not turn on. Some would give the
chime, others would not, but they all stopped before video initialized. The
standard procedure was to send out a replacement motherboard (refurb from a
contracted parts warehouse). These replacements would often suffer the same
failure within days of being installed, if not immediately. No one in the call
center seemed to know the problem.

I knew a little trick from my days in the school Mac Lab. I would have the
customer flip the power switch, wait ten seconds, then flip it off and back on
again (not too quickly). Often I would have the customer stand up and spin
around or some other humorous ruse before the second step. The Macintosh would
boot up and work fine. I would order a new motherboard battery ($2.50) and the
retailer would pay 75 bucks for a tech to go install it. Still much cheaper
than what they were doing before.

------
DevX101
Do a rough NPV and bring this up in your annual review if they try to nickel
and dime you on the raise.

~~~
sw1205
Yes I definitely will! It will at least make up for the other objectives that
I have failed at miserably!

------
perucoder
I once saved my old company about 300k(dollars) in fraud charges. They were a
telecom company and were experiencing massive fraud on some of their toll free
numbers from Brazil and the Philippines.

Using a web app I developed, I suggested removing these numbers from all
public sites and advising customers to call the help desk for them. You'd be
surprised how much pushing I had to do and how much resistance I faced,
especially since I was working in the marketing dept.

Anyway, they finally implemented my idea. Total fraud for 2009 was approx.
300k. For 2010, its approx. 50k.

------
lotharbot
During summers in college, I worked for a small web dev company that had a
private line into a client company's network (a microwave link between the
buildings, encrypted and with firewalls on both ends.)

One day, we completely lost the ability to log in from our building, and
therefore, to do billable work for that client (though they had space for 2-3
of our employees to work in one of their offices.) The other company insisted
they hadn't changed anything on their end, so it must've been something I did.
I did research, packet logging, analysis, and so on, and couldn't find
anything. This went on for days. Eventually I walked over to their server
room, and found the screens said "Windows 2000" where they had previously said
"Windows NT". Apparently they hadn't changed anything _except for the
operating system on the servers handling logins_ , which was clearly
unimportant and not worth mentioning. Another five minutes of research and I
discovered Win2K server used an additional service (triggered from their end)
to log in, which was being blocked by their firewall and therefore never
appeared in my logs.

I opened one port on my end, their firewall guy opened one on their end, and a
problem that was costing us half of our revenue was solved.

------
rrhyne
I saved a company I was contracting for 5k a month in wasted adwords expense
in the first hour of looking at thier account. They were happy to pay my fee.
:D

~~~
topcat31
I did that once too. Took 2 minutes looking at the account to realise they
were spending £3k / month driving traffic to a URL which didn't exist anymore.
They'd been driving traffic to that page for 18 months without noticing...!

~~~
random42
Please tell me you made them make the url live with important content.

------
masterponomo
I worked for a bank long ago. Realtime authorization requests and responses
went through an IBM Series/1 box--at the time a stack of computing power in a
6-foot cabinet. It locked up occasionally, choking off communications to/from
our auths system. Back then computers lived in a secured super-cooled room and
we programmers were forbidden to touch anything but the keyboard. SOP was to
call in a tech to "fix" it, meanwhile Visa and MasterCard would "stand in" on
our auths, at great expense and greatly increased fraud exposure. After a few
late-night emergencies I realized that the tech couldn't even do diagnostics
without rebooting the Series/1. And he never found a problem after rebooting.
That was at least an hour of stand-in time down the drain, mainly spent
waiting for the tech to get in there at 2:00 AM. So I developed the
revolutionary technique of hitting the forbidden Blue Button myself instead of
reporting an outage. Worked every time, and we almost never went into stand-in
after that. Management thought a firmware upgrade had fixed the S/1, when it
was just the ol' finger on the kill switch.

------
bsandbox
I'd imagine that most people who have worked for larger companies for
reasonable amounts of time should have plenty of these stories - after all
that's how good employees generate their value, through innovation. I've
worked on projects in the past that improve manufacturing yield by small
single digit percentage amounts. On product lines with revenue in the tens of
millions, these few percent really add up.

------
eftpotrm
I've no idea on numbers, it was never quantified to my knowledge (and I don't
think it really could be). However....

My former organisation had a collection of MI reports in their core
application to let them track any number of sales metrics. These were all
decidedly hard-coded and a pain to change; manually added to the menu screen
via source code and linked in with Crystal Reports templates. Frankly I don't
think anyone in the IT team liked using Crystal, particularly as the reports
were largely just straight results tables.

Myself and a colleague were less than fond of this system to put it mildly. I
had new business area I was supporting and they needed reports. So, we talked
to them about what they wanted and how they'd use them. Discovered Crystal was
just being used to export to Excel, so....

One database table was set up to let us bang in new reports without code
changes. One class was added to format results sets from the database into a
relatively tidy file in Excel.

Total time to do those two changes was, I reckon, less than the total time to
add a couple of reports the old way, and gave much faster deployment of new
reports. On top of this, over the next few months this business area gained
more MI reports than the entire rest of the business put together because they
were now so quick to produce. If they needed a new stat and we weren't backed
up on something else they could normally get it that day.

Cost savings? New area, new function, almost impossible to quantify. But I'm
sure we saved development cost just on the initial set they'd requested, I
know we were this way able to automate some reports they were having to do
laboriously by hand before and if they couldn't get more sales off the back of
the increased range of stats they asked for and got then I'd be disappointed
in the sales & marketing team.

------
GFischer
I work for an insurance company, that handles a lot of money for what's
standard in my country (Uruguay).

One of my coworkers found a flaw in the way the company set aside money to pay
for the car repairs. He talked to the CFO, and the ensuing change ended up
making the company quite a bit of money through interest (definitely much more
than 75k pounds).

The technical change itself took all of 15 minutes (a badly written SQL
select).

I'm still impressed at how insurance companies (and banks and other financial
institutions) can still make money while being massively inefficient.

At least in my country's case, I believe it's a combination of a huge cost of
entry and stifling legal regulations, but banks at least are having their
lunch eaten on the consumer lending front by smaller competitors (still no
good alternative on other services like payroll and big corp. money management
which is where the big margins are I guess).

------
aasarava
An organization I used to work for wanted to be able to analyze search
keywords entered on the website's search form. But the search was a homegrown
system.

So several business departments and the IT department entered into a series of
long debates about whether to spend time adding extra functionality to the
homegrown search or to just upgrade to something like Google Custom Search /
Google Search Appliance -- both options that would have taken a long time,
given the bureaucracy at the organization.

Meanwhile, in looking at the site's logfile analyses, I noticed that the
analysis software they were using was really good at letting you see stats on
GET queries in URLs. A quick look at the HTML for the site's search form
revealed that the form was using POST.

I suggested to the IT dept that they simply change the search form to use GET
instead of POST and call it a day. Done.

------
rhettinger
One client was charging-off sizeable bad debts on their accounts receivable,
but the program did not recognize that some of the receivable balance was for
the sales tax.

With a five-line change, $250k/yr was saved (you don't have to remit sales
taxes for money you never received).

------
davewasthere
Two lines of code (and Slackware Linux) and I saved 'The Firm' around $250k
(NZD)

Was an old Dental system written using a flavour of Unix that I've forgotten
now. The system ran over X.25, but we were moving to TCP/IP. In the end I
built up a bunch of slackware boxes that redirected tty1a to a telnet session
and back again. Worked a treat. And the bonus was - we were then able to
remote administer the original system (which wasn't possible before).

But while it was only two lines of code, it did take me a couple of months to
figure out a solution. I had to learn a lot to get to that point - but it gave
me a great appreciation for Linux.

------
jerdfelt
Shortly after I started a job, I noticed that we had large spikes in our
traffic stats. Updates would be sent to customers for various pieces of data
on a regular basis. They have previously implemented a simple form of
incremental updates, but because of the way it was implemented, it would
periodically have to send all of the data again. This was happening about once
day.

The spikes were often enough to push the 95th percentile up to an absurd
amount. I spent a few days making some changes to make all updates incremental
and ended up saving the company about $50k/mo in bandwidth charges.

------
ashleyreddy
Here is one I submitted to YC under the cool non-computer hacks: In the early
days of ppc advertising when it was straight auctions. I would call up all our
competitors and have them bid just 1 cent more than the previous guy so they
wouldnt loose their place but dropped our cost per click to 1/4 what we were
paying before (we were ranked first). I think Google changed there bidding
system because of me :)

Another one was where we replaced a site created by March 1st for over 1
million dollars with a Yahoo! store in 48 hours for about $50.00/month

------
p01nd3xt3r
About 10 years ago I worked at a company called Nu-kote that did printer / ink
supply chain stuff. They had clients like office depot office max etc... There
was a system alled extenterprise that was like the daily dashboard /
forecasting system for the sales team. On my 3rd day I fixed some problems
that extenterprise was having. After about 3 months I was given a bonus
because my forecasting algorithm was substantially more accurate than what was
previously being used and it saved / made the company tons of money.

------
trizk
Yep. I quit. (and launched a start-up)

~~~
FreeRadical
If your previous employer had to replace you then there was no saving, also
there may have been recruitment fees to get a new employee

~~~
JanezStupar
That's not how it works for most employers I have seen in my day :)

------
cdr
In one of my college jobs, I was the only software-knowledgeable person
working in a test lab full of hardware people.

Their test-tracking and defect-tracking process required essentially reading
data off of a machine and re-entering it; I figured out how to scrape the data
from the terminal and use GUI automation to populate the appropriate fields at
the click of button. This saved several hours per person per week over 40-50
people.

------
rcfox
I spent a week writing an Excel macro for my old boss (hardware engineers tend
to use Excel for everything!) that did literally a full day's worth of tedious
work in about one second.

I never did get an estimate on the savings, but he uses this macro whenever
there's a problem in manufacturing. So that's one senior engineer's day of
work, plus one day of manufacturing doing nothing, saved each time.

------
topcat31
I was hired to do consulting so it wasn't my direct employer but this was a
pretty quick change (<5mins) that saved a lot of money(>$500,000 / year):

[http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-wrong-
tracking-c...](http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-wrong-tracking-
code-can-cost-you.html)

------
binarymax
Thats very interesting, many many years ago I almost built a startup on your
very post - but changed my mind at the last minute. Basically workstation
software that reported back to a central server its idleness in increments of
X minutes, giving large orgs an overall picture of their idle machine drain.

------
thewileyone
In a retail environment, I instilled more discipline in the workflow so that
committed timelines were met thus improving customer service. Also started up-
and cross-selling services.

Sales improved by 42% in one year.

------
tlack
I've saved a number of people quite a bit of server costs with memcached.

------
duffbeer703
The bigger the company, the easier it is to do this. I try to track major
things that either avoid expenditure or save money while improving services or
eliminating useless spending.

Generally, I'm able to hit 3-4x salary. Once I was able to save the place
10-15x my salary by aggressively decommissioning some ancient, expensive to
maintain legacy applications. Of course, this work is usually a team effort...
but it's still a good feeling.

