Gold fever hits fortune 500 co.

Looks like gold fever has hit some one at my #1 supplier or to be more precise some one in the warehouse.

Last week I got four pallets of servers from them, about my 20th load or so. I started on them last week end. The driver told me there was about one pallet that had been scavenged for parts. He was both right and wrong. He was right the first pallet was just empty cases and he was wrong, I have now gone through 3 of the 4 pallets and they have all been cherry picked. I have gotten 6 heat sinks,7 CPUs and about 10 gold mem sticks from 3 pallets..

I know it is some one in the ware house because all the missing parts are the easy to get to stuff and pieces that a newb would think is most valuable also there are certain custom servers by IBM, HP, and Cisco that are very hard to get into unless you know how. These are the only ones I found the heat sinks and ram in. This also tells me it wasn't the techs looking for replacement parts.

Not sure if there is any thing I can do about it. With Iron at .07 I'm loosing money on the empty cases and my yield on the rest has been cut 30 to 50%.

In our contract we agreed to take all IT scrap the good with the bad.

This is the good and the bad about our instant information age. It is also the up and down side of our forum and others like it. It is also a change in the supply train and as I see it will change our business as eventually every block will have it's own wana be "e scrapper".

We have to figure out a way to get ahead of this trend. (not a rant mealy a forecasted shift in the market. mcw

I got my block. ;)


I'll keep plucking away, making deals as I can. It has it's perks not doing it full time. I feel your pain though.

@olddude: This sounds like a case of employee theft. When those servers were in that warehouse, legally they belonged either to your supplier or to you (depending on when the sale actually happened). If somebody working in the warehouse helped himself to the goodies inside those boxes, he didn't have the right to do that. If that warehouse belongs to your supplier or he had a contract with them for the safe storage of those servers, you should definitely let him know what happened. Otherwise, if you had the contract with the warehouse, you should speak to whoever is in charge there. The folks running that warehouse need to know about this. They could end up in a lot of trouble if they have an employee stealing valuables from their customers. To tell you the truth, they should also compensate you for your loss. If you have a good longstanding relationship with them, you might not want to insist on something like that. On the other hand, they should have insurance to cover problems like this, so maybe you could bring that up.

Dealing with multi million dollar ($40,000,000) IT systems in mega corporations
is a little different. Actual ownership and disposal of the main hard ware is most times a very complicated situation. This exacerbates our situation. Can't go into details due to disclosure clauses in the contract. Just suffice it to say they have more important situations to consider then a small time scrapper missing a few parts, if you get my drift. The probably have 500 or so Lawyers, I struggle just to pay my power bill, in a legal battle I'm Toast. 50 to 70% of something is worth more then 100% of nothing.

In one city location there is a scrap yard that pays about half or less of what the stuff is worth, my nightmare is , this is where its ending up.

Understood. I didn't mean to imply that you should get dragged into any legal battles over a few palettes of servers -- that would be insanity. I don't think even a bad lawyer would agree to do something like that. I just meant it might be a good idea to have a conversation with your contact and let somebody know what's going on at that warehouse. But I don't know the details about your deal, of course, so maybe that's not really an option. These kinds of situations can be touchy. Anyway, I sure hope it doesn't happen again!

I would at least ask the question, as to if this was "bad" material, or "good" material, that was vandalized. You have a history of knowing what to expect, good and bad, so by asking you may be alerting them to a bigger problem than just what was missing from this load. jus my 2

I would talk to the person whom I set up the contract with. Let them know whats what. Not that you would want to get out of the deal but you expect to get what the "deal" was! Its business after all, and they are well aware of there end...

this has happened to me at scrap yards I buy from.........One load will be stripped all processors and memory then the next load will be full of working dual core units.......The good with the bad....LOL..............If it happens more than twice in a row (which it really never has) then I might say something.....LOL.......

Ive been having the same problem. Most of the computers ive been getting from one supplier have been raided. They pop the heat sink off and grab the cpu and ram. But they leave the heatsink and everything else.

I said something. And he basically said its out of his control. And (i pay per unit not weight) i made a deal saying ill pay slightly less for these one. And now he keeps them locked up.

I had a think and this is what I thought...I would talk to the supplier and make comment your concerned about sensitive information on the hard drives cant be processed because all units have been tampered with.