Autozone seems to be the latest company to adopt the management philosophy of every Indian consulting company I have ever encountered. Shit service and ignore your responsibilities.
I’ve encountered so many of them given my nearly four decades in IT consulting. Collabera, Tata, KForce, they are all the same. Yes, KForce claims to be American but they are run just like every other Indian consulting company. Shit service, bad communications, and low rates. The kind of bottom feeder other bottom feeders look at and say “Man! You are a bottom feeder!”
Tata even has the added benefit of paying record fines for illegal activities. You can bet management didn’t take that $140 million out of their own pocket, they took it out of the worker’s wages.
Agile == Shit Systems
In out race to the bottom with piss poor management world, Agile has gotten the attention of upper management. It allows them to commit pre-SOX accounting fraud with a get out of jail free card. As long as you never actually write down what a system is supposed to do, you can:
- run automated tests that test nothing
- claim to be using TDD (Test Driven Development)
- charge a sky high internal chargeback rates
- book whatever turd came out the back of the sprint as an asset before you pay the developers
Enron used to have to pay one of the Big-6 accounting firms a lot of money to get a stratospheric valuation for software that doesn’t work. Now you just have to keep running sprints and jacking up the chargeback rate!
Shit Systems Begat Shit Management and Processes
When you are aiming below the bottom of the market with your systems quality, it doesn’t take long before you have management even worse than Keller graduates. Any line they can leave off the cost spreadsheet without getting caught is a line worth leaving off.
Customer satisfaction is a line you can definitely leave off! Once it is off there is no end to the things you can eliminate as a cost cutting measure.
When it comes to the Indian consulting firms, this takes the form of zero follow-up. The “recruiter” you spoke with won’t be working there next week and there will be zero turn over. The phone number they gave you will be disconnected the next time you call it. You will never get an update from the company even if the end client requests an interview with you. Somewhere in that chain of 32,767 cousins all taking a cut along the way, the message will simply be ignored.
How Auto Parts Are Supposed to Work
As an IT consultant I’ve worked on a not insignificant number of auto parts ordering and inventory management systems. I worked for real companies. They didn’t put together a house of cards using AWS, Azure, and whatever else is supposed to be a magic bullet. They didn’t suffer from abandoned shopping cart syndrome because no order could be lost.
When physical inventory didn’t match what the system said, someone physically contacted the customer to give them the choice of cancel or backorder. The system was designed to automatically route this work. For big customers it was an electronic contact that required their electronic response before any further action was taken on the order. We didn’t partial fill and ship unless it was approved. Smaller customers got an actual phone call. You never partial ship without first receiving approval, period.
How Autozone Works
The shit you could get anywhere, like transmission fluid, gets shipped instantly. The things you actually need long before that, like transmission cooler lines, get fumbled around for days, then cancelled after a partial ship of what you do not need.
If one is leaking on an old vehicle, you might as well replace them because they are both the same age. After fully accepting the order
Autozone immediately shipped the large jug of fluid and fumbled around for days then cancelled the rest of the order. Talk about a bait & switch! Advertise shit you don’t have then ship them the trash they could have bought elsewhere cheaper just to make a sale.
Agile == Shit Systems
The online chat people are of no use. The built with Agile shit system Autozone has not only allows partial ship without contacting the customer to scam sales, it blocks the warehouse from having customer contact. If the inventory shelf is bare the only thing they can do is cancel that item on the order. In the meantime the scam has already run! The stuff you could have gotten elsewhere cheaper has already shipped.
Summary
It is my hope that all of you read this and cease doing business with Autozone. We just need to take away 1% of their business each and every day and in 100 days they will finally learn the high cost of shit management.
Featured image courtesy of : Photo 80578201 © Ken Wolter | Dreamstime.com
