Verian

Could You Dodge 14,000 Bullets?

October 6th, 2011 | No Comments

My bet is some people at Fort Bragg can’t.   Fort Bragg recently announced that 14,000 rounds of ammunition for M-4 and M-16 assault rifles went missing. After a base lockdown and thorough search, investigators came up empty handed. Under the guise of national security, I am sure we will never know what happened.  However, I do believe someone’s head will roll and some new procurement technologies are coming to this North Carolina base soon.

Wachoiva Bank is also in North Carolina, and I recently read with great interest about a purchasing manager employed there who is making a move from a big lake house to the big house. Apparently, money from 11 million dollars in fictitious invoices he approved found their way into his personal bank account.  I’m curious if his personal bank account was with Wachovia or if he added insult to injury by keeping the funds at crosstown rival Bank Of America.

So much for having faith in the integrity of people living in the Bible Belt.  I live in North Carolina and it is full of wonderful, trustworthy people. But in almost every case like this one, the person who perpetrated the fraud is described as a wonderful, trustworthy person.  What made them untrustworthy is they were put in a position of great responsibility with irresistible temptation and little control. Sometimes good people do bad things.

That is why one of the largest sheriff’s offices in the country worked with us to protect themselves against such theft and fraud.   Our purchase-to-pay system gave them very strict controls and visibility over guns, ammunition and other law enforcement equipment. The organization automated requisition and  three other key processes to protect the safety and pocketbooks of their taxpaying citizens.  Here are some highlights:

1)     Transfer orders – “On-loan” items like uniforms and other more dangerous equipment is lent to officers from an internal warehouse, which is replenished by the purchasing department.  When the items are received, an open ticket is issued that associates the item with the officer. Management has access to a dashboard of all open tickets: they know exactly who has what and when they were received.

2)     Stock control – Inventory management capabilities within the system allow for cyclical counts of stock, which can be set to run on-demand or at regular intervals. Discrepancies can be quickly discovered and tracked. Cycle counts on items like ammunition are bumped against orders to maintain safety standards.

3)     Asset management – A secondary tracking and security layer was put in place to apply personal ownership of high-risk items like guns. When a gun is issued, it is opened as an asset and assigned ownership to the employee. The system has the ability to track the physical location as well as the fluctuating value of assets through their entire life cycle.

The sheriff’s office has been using the system for several years now and it helps give the whole department peace of mind.

Law enforcement sees good people doing bad things every day.  That is why they would rather invest in technology than put their wonderful, trustworthy employees in an overly tempting situation.

You know who wished they hadn’t put their soldiers in such a tempting position?  The people in charge of ammunition at Fort Bragg.  They have to dodge 14,000 bullets to keep their job.  I doubt if they can do it.

Could you?

Mark Schaffner
VP of Marketing
Verian
mschaffner@verian.com