Industry best practices in the field of "checking to see if your supply room actually contains what your system says it does" are 95 percent. If the supply room has what the system says it does, in the quantity it says it does, 19 times out of 20 — you're good.
In a recent Controller's Office audit of the San Francisco General Hospital supply room, that lofty mark was not reached. Of 24 items the controller spot-checked, 23 weren't in the quantity or location the hospital's inventory system said they'd be.
That's a 4 percent accuracy rate.
Queried if this is as bad as it sounds, auditor Mamadou Gning responded immediately and with a hint of disbelief such a question even needed to be asked: "Oh, yes!"
Getting it wrong 96 percent of the time renders SFGH an outlier. But not by as much as you'd hope. Controller's audits of storerooms at Laguna Honda Hospital and the Port of San Francisco revealed a "discrepancy rate" of between 21 and 48 percent (5 percent, again, is the target).
SFGH is also typical in not using barcoding to keep track of its wares. (It warrants mentioning that June 26 marked the 40th anniversary of the first commercial scan of a barcode — a pack of Juicy Fruit gum at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.)
To call barcoding ubiquitous in the commercial world would be an understatement. Explaining why is almost as needless as asking Gning if a 4 percent accuracy rating is problematic. But, for the sake of argument, barcoding hardware firms claim that a 99 percent inventory accuracy rating is "the norm." Which is a lot higher than 4 percent.
Barcoding is, in fact, little-used throughout San Francisco, a city with hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory sitting on its shelves (or not). Asked if there's a reason for this, Tonia Lediju, the director of city audits, mentions startup costs and training. Asked if there's a good reason for this, she pauses. "I don't know we have an answer to that."
The Public Utilities Commission, it turns out, does use barcoding — on most, but not all, of its inventory. Muni, however, doesn't use it to track the 21,000 parts in its many storerooms. Mechanics say they frequently cannot obtain needed items. Managers say automated reordering is routinely overridden when Muni wants to pinch pennies.
Agency spokesman Paul Rose says Muni is "working towards" using barcoding, which "is planned" to be part of a new asset-management system in 2015.
That's only 19 years after another audit excoriated Muni for not using barcoding. Still, per the dictionary, this is a measure of "progress."
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