Quote:
Originally Posted by Soundchaser
Oddly, my ups tracking data shows delivery as 7/12 and shipment on 6/23. Anyone else have such a lag?
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I wish I could say you're one of the few like that, but you're not.
Time for a massive rundown, I think. Hold onto your hats.
The warehouse didn't really run things with this the way that I expected, nor as fast as I expected. I knew we were pushing them at the limits of what they could handle, but after a few speedbumps (some hospital visits still ongoing, supply chain issues on packing supplies, needing to bring on additional but training-needing staffers to help with the demand, etc) it has emerged -- in a deeply frustrating, nothing-I-can-really-do-about-it way -- that things are actually a bit past what they can handle in the timeframe I'd had in mind (2 weeks tops).
So going into this past weekend they've still been working on wrapping the thing up. I believe that by the first or at most the second workday of this coming week that everything UPS will finally be in the loading dock; they have all of the labels done, but the labels and the packages they belong to have not necessarily all been put together.
And found in that detail right there is one of the points of frustration for me. I would've expected, say, a day of prepping 200 or so labels* by the person handling the data, and then the rest of the staff putting those labels together with the packages within one or two business days of their generation. Why some of these labels were generated and then sat without packages for a week or more is really beyond me; it's also possible (but impossible to tell) that there were big stacks of labeled packages that simply didn't get onto the UPS trucks, because sometimes the drivers show up, grab what they see as ready to go, and take off without talking to the staffers there who might've guided them towards the continuing stacks around the corner. Deeply frustrating regardless, and doubly so because I've been trying to reconstruct the details along the way from scant bits of info in emails and 15-second conversations.
* 200, give or take, appears to have been a more realistic rate. I originally thought 320 a day wouldn't be that tough, and would have knocked through the 1604 preorders in a week after a couple days of preparation and training were spent up front. That would've taken things to the middle of this past week rather than into and a bit beyond this weekend. Alas. Grrr.
Even accounting for an understaffing issue due to Much Life Happening At The Same Time, the flow of process there has had me mystified. But there's only so much intrusion into their getting-stuff-doneness I can afford to do to try to find some answers out, because those intrusions cost time off their ability to get other things (like shipping) done. And given some of the medical issues going on I also am not inclined to be too much of a dick about it; bad shit happens to good people and despite my frustrations I'm confident the people involved deserve my sympathy.
A few other things have happened in terms of communication that are at least partly on me, and for that I am deeply sorry. Clearly I had some expectations about the timeframe and logistics on this that reality has not borne up. How much that could have been addressed had I made all of those expectations very explicit is anyone's guess. We also had to peel away the warehouse's top dog in order to handle on the ground logistics at Origins, so while I was able to get some information from him for a few minutes each day ("yeah, looks like the FedEx guy didn't come out yesterday with the packing materials just as we ran out of them; he'll be there tomorrow"), that doesn't mean that every piece of information I gave him went straight back to the folks in the Nevada warehouse intact.
Also, prior to Origins we had had a couple conversations about the order in which things might be done. One suggestion was to ship things at the furthest distance from the warehouse out first, but that one didn't last long as some difficulties in pulling that off came up (I don't have a clear recollection of what the difficulties were). Another was to sort things in order of their order number and do them sequentially. This idea seemed to get traction, and was in fact what I thought was being done, but once I started getting the tracking number reports in (beginning of this past week) it started to emerge that it wasn't what was done, really. (Insert more frustration and sadness here.) I thought it was what was happening; the warehouse folks may have moved on to another strategy; a connection wasn't made about that. The fact of the matter is I'm not at all sure what the strategy was -- maybe it was about groups of similar packages, or certain zip code things, or a labor-split-then-re-merge on the data entry and label generation.
If I had it to do over again, with full knowledge that things were going to be well past the capability of the warehouse to execute on in 2 weeks or less, I would've partnered with one of my distributors (probably Alliance, with their nice big warehouses and proportionally larger staff) to do the fulfillment here.
Mea culpa. I figured going to the dance with my current date was the right move, and instead we've both emerged stressy and having stepped on each others' feet a lot. And there's nothing I can really do to speed things along any faster than they're going; what's done is done, and what's about to be done will be done as quickly as it can be.
I've got plenty of ideas how to do it better next time. I just wish we'd landed closer to my ideal than we did *this* time.