Leverage Your Nothing

[sechs]

Anybody heard of or used these guy(s)?
http://www.perlmutterpurchasing.com/

I'm working with the program manager of a grant project attached to a local university to get appropriate computer gear that's within their relatively meager budget. All they really need is a couple laptops, a desktop, a small workgroup printer, and a personal printer.

After fighting with *the* IT guy for the department to which the grant is attached to rightsize the equipment, we apparently have to go through another layer of bureaucracy, and they can/will only order the laptops through the above company. This appears to be different than the regular purchasing process used at the university.

Anyway, the guy who owns this place says that his distributor doesn't have one of the Thinkpad models that we finally all agreed on. This is despite the fact that I could order it from about six reputable resellers, such as CDW.

If you opened the link, the website is crappy. And since the two layers of bureaucrats didn't strip out his messages from e-mail conversations, I can see that he uses a RoadRunner (TimeWarner Cable) personal e-mail address for business. Basically, nothing to instill confidence.

I've worked in government before, but this has been an amazingly frustrating process. And I'm basically doing this for free. Is dealing with this "company" going to make things worse?

 

[MaxBurn]

Yup, one man show if it is the same Mark Perlmutter that the domain lookup reveals. Have you met with Mark? That could go either way depending on the guy.

 

[ddrueding]

Sounds like a bit of an inside deal. It might be worth checking to see if the people giving the money know it's being inefficiently allocated. I understand sometimes you need to wade through the garbage to do a job, but depending on how much work you will be doing in the future, it might be worth taking out the trash now.

 

[Pradeep]

In my experience such purchases would be done through the university computer sales store. And we might put it out to quote with a few local people like our Officemax lady, to provide price competition. It's a lot easier to have a purchase order signed and submitted to the sales department than getting a payment for any outside vendor. Of course with our size credit terms are no problem so we pay on invoice if we go third party.

 

[ddrueding]

Getting a payment out is what accounting is for. I just cut the PO and let them worry about it. If they need money now, that's what reimbursement forms are for.

 

[sechs]

The whole thing is a little irregular, in my opinion.

So, the reason we have to go though the department for this equipment is because this is how they're cost-sharing on the grant. As I understand it, there's nothing unusual about that. What's weird is that we're not just going to a catalog and picking out models, and the department IT guy keeps trying to upgrade everything.

I haven't and probably won't see prices, but do folks suggest that someone may be getting a kick-back here?

 

[ddrueding]

That's what I'm suggesting, yes. Is the IT guy the one directing the purchase? Perhaps there is a way to mention that you find it odd without sticking your neck out too far?

 

[Mercutio]

It might not even be a kickback. It might be that these guys sent a hot chick over to buy some poor guy with authority over procurement a nice lunch.

That's a really frustrating situation to be in, though.

 

[sechs]

I don't know the department IT guy, and don't have direct contact with him. I only communicate with the program manager and the department's grants administrator. I only get information forwarded to me; my responses usually include swearing and phrases like "what is this guy smoking?"

The program manager has great trust in my judgment as far as computer stuff goes, but doesn't want to press this issue, for fear of causing problems. The grants administrator presumes that this is SOP, but really doesn't know.

I guess the good news is that we talked him out of getting two $1k printers, and the we got the laptop that we wanted except that it has discrete graphics -- which is bad news in as much as it appears that model Thinkpad doesn't support switching. We weren't able to talk him out of buying one $1k printer or upgrading all of the computers to 8GB of RAM -- which means he'll be paying this Perlmutter assclown to bust open the laptops to get to both DIMMs.

 

[sechs]

It's been three weeks since we put in the request with the IT guy, and we have no laptops and no printers (even the $1k HP he insisted on).

Folks here are now starting to think that there's an issue. I may be able to convince someone to at least ask the IT guy's manager what's the deal is....