We were asked by a judge this past weekend how our team keeps inventory in our shop. We were a bit confused when the judge asked, as it had nothing pertaining to robot design or community outreach type things. Why would a judge be asking this, and what would an appropriate answer be?
Thanks from a rookie team,
heh…if you have a good answer, it means your team is worthy of Rookie All Star? 
This is a brand new question for me, and I’ve read and heard about a lot of Judge questions.
Did you perhaps have a business plan available to promote yourself for the Entrepreneurship award? This is the award I think might be most applicable to an inventory?
My answer would be along the lines of “We are a just-in-time organisation. To the extent we have inventory, it consists mainly of parts salvaged from previous year’s robots. Otherwise, our goal is to get the parts into the shop a few days before they’re needed while minimizing shipping and storage costs to the extent practical.”
We had a business plan, but not for the purposes of Entrepreneurship award. We had created it to apply for a rookie grant, so we figured we might as well bring it to competition to show it off. We did show it to judges, however these were not the same judges that asked about inventory.
It’s possible that two sets of judges were judging multiple awards and they came back to ask different questions. This is pure speculation on my part, but it’s possible you were in contention for the Entrepreneurship Award, which is pretty neat. Did you end up winning any awards at the event?
Actually, it kinda does. While you can CAD your way out of a lot of things, having the right mix of COTS parts (particularly gussets, but also some gearboxes and sprockets) allows teams to build and iterate faster, which means more drive practice and shakedown time. And even the custom parts usually call for spares, which means storing them somewhere for quick access.
It’s part of why 1293 built a new pit this off-season too. We used to put everything in KoP totes, then take it to the event, set up shelves, and unload it. That process took us over an hour at Smoky Mountains 2018, time we really needed to get the new climber structure on, and even then we had to remember where we put all that crap since it was a different arrangement than at home. Now, nearly everything rolls into the venue and is in the exact same place as it was in the shop.
So yeah, it doesn’t…but it does.
We won “Rookie Inspiration” , which I guess is sort of a culminating award? That would make sense.
Congrats! Great award to win.
I might just be them being curious, I know I’ve asked a few teams I inspect about their robot even through it’s not a question that pertains to inspection.
Asking about inventory I would interpret as the Judge trying to understand your engineering process. Judges do want to hear about your robot, but that also want to know about your processes including design, training, iteration, and yes, inventory management. And let me tell you, this is my 9th season in FRC; anticipating needs for COTS parts, materials, and ordering things on time is continually a struggle.
Some judges also like to ask questions that are something you’ve never heard before. They might be slightly off-topic but will encourage the students to think on their feet and it is not so off-topic that the conversation won’t lead back to whatever the specific thing you are being judged for is. A lot of teams and students have canned responses for the typical questions but asking a question like this, students are forced to be genuine since they probably haven’t rehearsed anything.
This is also speculation, but I know many judges who have used this technique to spark a non-rehearsed conservation.
It’s definitely a weird question and I agree that they were probably doing it to shake things up a bit. As to how I would answer it, I would just tell them how we kept inventory. For our team specifically we do a full inventory before build so we know exactly what we have. If you aren’t keeping inventory I would recommend doing it at least once a year. It helps make sure we aren’t buying extra stuff we already have and we know what we need to buy.
May be judge was just curious on how you manage inventory.
So, when I’m talking to teams Im doing a couple things - obviously Im trying to be a detective and figure out what the team did. Others I’m asking leading questions to help them identify issues they may run into down the road.
I had a great discussion with a couple of rookies in Arkansas last weekend about how they were going to make sure the lessons they learned the hard way got communicated to students the next year. Then talked about how we could do better by rookies in the future.
Not all questions are related to awards either, sometimes the judge is just curious about things.
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