by Serguey Shinder
In May 2024 an electrician in Sheffield rang one of our branches to ask why his van was full of bathroom extractor fans. He had not ordered any. He had used the repeat order button on our trade website, as he did every fortnight, and the list behind that button said, as it had for six years, fifty boxes of a particular twenty millimetre cable clip.
Except that the product code on his list no longer meant cable clips. The clip had been discontinued in 2022. Eighteen months later a buyer setting up a new range of extractor fans needed codes, found a block of unused ones, and took the next free number. Our system allowed it. As far as the database was concerned, the old code was not in use. The product behind it was marked inactive, nothing was in stock, nothing had sold for a year and a half.
But plenty of things still pointed at it. Saved order lists on four hundred and twelve trade accounts. Contract price agreements with two housebuilders. Our own sales history, which now reported that a fan had been selling steadily since 2016. And the bar code labels on bins in eleven branches, which nobody had peeled off, so a picker scanning an empty clip bin was told, correctly according to the system, that it should contain fans.
What I had misunderstood was the difference between a code being unused and a code being forgotten. Nothing in our system was using it, but the code had been written down for years, on lists, in agreements, on labels and in reports, and all of those places still believed it meant what it had always meant. Giving it a new meaning did not update them. It quietly changed what every one of them said.
We found forty seven codes that had been reissued since 2015. Most had done no visible harm, which I now suspect means nobody looked.
Codes are never reissued now. A retired code stays in the catalogue for ever, marked retired, with a line saying what replaced it, if anything did. Anything that refers to a retired code, a saved list, a contract line, a branch label, produces a warning naming the replacement and asks a person to choose rather than guessing. New products take codes from a sequence that only goes upwards. The buyers grumbled briefly about codes getting long, and then stopped noticing.
The electrician got his clips the next morning, and kept two of the fans, which he said were better than the ones he had.
An identifier you once handed out belongs to everyone who wrote it down. Giving it to something else changes all of their records at once, without telling any of them.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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