Many times. A few of my favorites:
- We upgraded our hardware and our forecasting software vendor wanted a one time $250,000 charge. I convinced my boss to replace them with in-house written software. Took 6 weeks to write.
- Our 400 worker factory was $30,000 under-absorbed per month. I wrote both standard costing and data collection software. Supervisors compared the standards to the actuals to discover where they were losing money. We were over-absorbed by $30,000 per month 6 months later.
- We budgeted over $1 million for a new ERP system to “solve all of our problems”. I helped others solve most of their problems by identifying them and coming up with solutions from the existing software. We never did buy new software.
- (My favorite). Our HCFA feed from the U.S. Government was broken and no one knew why. I dug in and changed 1 byte of code (1 byte, not 1 line). The next day, our bank account had $6.5 million more in it. I never had the heart to tell them how easy it was to fix.