A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be?
Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Then actual delivery need to be scheduled on the phone. Every time. The pallets don't fit in the elevator after all, so need men to move boxes. Someone need to dispose of the pallets. The building doesn't have large item disposal.
To assemble 60 desks we need men, tools, floor-plan, access to the building, etc.
Someone has to clean up the packaging material. Then of course one of the 60 boxes were dropped, now damaged and needs replacing. Sending one box is a different game than sending 60. Even if you know what you are doing it takes a lot of emails and phone calls to outfit an office with furniture, and somehow everyone wants to communicate over phone or email, so automation is impossible. And that's how my e-commerce company turned into a service business wiped out all my profits :) (edited for typos)
If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.
I'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).
We did exactly this where I'm an expensive consultant. The one who assembled his table the fastest won a prize.
My workplace might be a little different but we also are responsible for moving the dishes in and out of the dishwasher. I'm happy to do it.
Tongue-in-cheek/devil's advocate reply: I wouldn't necessarily consider building furniture a very safe team building excercise, it may just have the opposite result ;-)
I'd be happy to manage my own desk procurement, including organizing the delivery and assembly, if my employer wanted to pay me for it - that's still paying an engineer for administrative work, but maybe less of it at least.
A former boss of mine told the employees to assemble the furniture at the new location. It was fast and it looked good.
After a week the monitors started to fail, because the cable to the monitor was too tight, so when they moved the monitor, the contact on the back of the monitor broke.
Ha, at my partner's work(large IT company in UK) they are not even allowed to move or adjust the height of their own desks, because it's a health and safety violation and if anything happened to them doing it the insurance wouldn't cover them. I think HR would get a heart attack at the thought of employees assembling their own desks.
Yea i always found this funny. I was not allowed to move a monitor in the office, but was racking 4u servers by myself in the datacenter. When i asked they claimed it was because the insurance for the monitor, not me, would not be covered if it was not the local IT guy who moved it.
Speakeasy, a former big ISP, presented at a Java users group one time about a logistics app they had written specifically to remind them when it was time to harass Covad about missing deadlines for wiring and circuit connections.
I’d had to deal with Covad before and so had my friend who used to own a mom and pop ISP. I thought the fact that someone wrote a management app just for them was funny and sad, brilliant and justified.
Sounds like the minimum level of automation that would work is full blown AGI + autonomous robots that could at least match humans in terms of skill and strength.
