Something more efficient would be something like this:
- there is a closet in the kitchen with extra supplies: milk, sugar, ...
- Kasia goes in the kitchen once per week to do the inventory of remaining supplies. If items <= 1, then she order new extra items for each low in quantity supplies...
more efficient and convenient for both in the end.
Imagine the burden to have to put a postit on all products, to manage them on your desk, to stack them and remember to count them to reorder.
Also because you will not pass your order item by item, like just ordering milk and then sugar 2 days later...
I love how you are not even realising that behind the oatmilk ticket is written "last oatmilk", the behind the half and half one is written "only 3 half and half" behind the foo ticket "foo down to f(frequency of foo use)", and the person now now only need to go through the tickets at the end of the week (or if more than N tickets).
I will let you ponder if you need to reticket all, or just the reordered product, wether a stack can have multiple ticket (a white one say 5 from the last and one red one two from the back know wether you need an urgent order) etc...
And whether or miracle, if you don't receive any ticket a week that you don't need to reorder !
It's amazing how if that was expressed in term of resource allocation, reference counting, tagged pointers, scaling heuristic, garbage collect... that would click in people's mind, but many are incapable at abstracting because they feel they are beyond this.
I don't understand how you consider all this complexity to be better than to just have an inventory of what have to be ordered once in a while.
In a batch, at the secretary or office manager own time.
Instead of all the things to be managed, the tickets that have to be written, with somehow a kind of brain fuck logic, someone going to this person desk at any interval, might even be interrupting the office manager, the other one having to keep and manage the tickets.
Like when things are ordered, you have to let the post-it in another place like "ordered but not here yet". And maybe the day after things are ordered, another ticket will arrive but sadly the order is already done, so will have to wait for next week anyway...
And think also, like when you are using milk for your coffee, and crap, it is the last drop, so you have to drop everything to bring this stupid ticket to the board or secretary desk.
If it is such a brillant idea, I'm wondering why no one use such a strategy for managing home supplies...
I think the societal aspect of your collegues being helpful to each other, while not having that exact task assigned, is the reason you could appreciate this setup. I think putting a card on another person's desk and walking away isn't really interrupting, anyway.
Besides, visually seeing stock going low helps the one doing purchases in deciding whether said supply needs immediate restocking, or that there's ample time to collect more low-velocity stock to batch them in one order.
As mentioned elsewhere, the person purchasing may not consume (in this example) milk at all!
Your proposal probably is an improvement (though there may be some reason it's not feasible in this case -- no closet in the kitchen, etc), but calling the original idea "very stupid" is quite the ungenerous overstatement. It's still clever, still works much better than not having it at all, and is only slightly less efficient that what you're proposing.
If you don't have a closet, it's even easier, everything will be outside in plain sight. So the office manager just need a minute passing by the kitchen to see what would have to be ordered.
In a ideal world where items could be ordered immediately individually, maybe it could have some value, but in that case you might as easily have an app or a shared excel with employees reporting what is running out.
But in a real world, things will be ordered in batch at a specific and fixed frequency time.
You are presuming a lot, and the proposed solution you are ridiculing does have possible advantages that you aren't taking account of.
> So the office manager just need a minute passing by the kitchen to see what would have to be ordered.
This requires effort on her part, and is easy to forget to do. Sure, she could schedule it on her calendar or something, but that also takes effort, and can still be forgotten. This way, maybe she sees the ticket on her desk and immediately reorders on Amazon. In fact, it wouldn't shock me if she had considered your solution and rejected it for these reasons.
> In a ideal world where items could be ordered immediately individually, maybe it could have some value, but in that case you might as easily have an app or a shared excel with employees reporting what is running out.
At least here in the US, it is the world we live in now, with Amazon. Also, once again you are ignoring human factors. People having to remember to go to some spreadsheet and put it in an order. They'll often forget on the walk to their desk, or just not bother. Whereas taking a card around the corner and placing it on the manager's desk will likely have better compliance, and be more convenient.
> But in a real world, things will be ordered in batch at a specific and fixed frequency time.
And I say that it is stupid because from my point of view, you bring a very complex and time costly solution to something that could be solved a lot more simply and efficiently.
Very sadly it is a pattern that we see very commonly in current day software world.
Like using Langchain for doing requests to openai, in llm world, and big company hiring expensive consulting firms to tell them what any low level employee in the firm could have told them.
Something more efficient would be something like this:
- there is a closet in the kitchen with extra supplies: milk, sugar, ...
- Kasia goes in the kitchen once per week to do the inventory of remaining supplies. If items <= 1, then she order new extra items for each low in quantity supplies...