Here's what it's like for any of our large shipments:
Pallets are being devanned, meaning they take out the several shipments that share a container. Then it takes a few days to be released from customs, then to schedule a truck to pick them up and deliver them to our warehouse. I hope for a Thursday or Friday arrival then we can sort them over the weekend and run the UPS tags. We shift from software orders, to hard copies of invoices and shipping labels placed on each box. Once all are set aside, paid orders, layaway, holds, delayed shipping, internationals, which require an inhouse inspection, special road number requests, multiple orders needing different road numbers, then we can see if there are any discrepancies in what should be left, which is very little in this projects case. This is why we want all paid orders completed before the models arrive to be sorted. Customers that request processing only when ready to ship are last to be shipped for obvious reasons. If we see a shortage in one road 2R or 3R, it tells us they either marked the box wrong, made an error in the packing list or just plain shorted us a model and we have to search all boxes of that type to discover the pattern of the error. I've seen them put 2R in in 3R marked boxes, one road into another road, but they follow a pattern which is uncovered when all of that segment of boxes opened. We don't want to have to open 500 boxes with the few people we have. It would take weeks. Their packing list is sometimes messed up a little too. But it all comes out when we pull the orders and place the invoices on them. Then we know what segments of the shipment have to be opened and inspected for accuracy. I know the people that pack these at the factory, and they occasionally mess up. I've often begged them, threatened to charge them for their errors, but they are human as human can be. So I generally keep my frustration to myself. It's never 100% and it's very costly to return ship models just because the labeling was wrong.
I know this sounds backwards to conventional thought, but most of the errors in packing or invoicing are discovered this way before we ship.
Once we feel confident that most all is correct, we release them all at one time to UPS.
So when you get the notice from UPS of a shipment from us, we haven't actually released it to UPS for 2-5 days, depending on the task at hand. When the tracking shows an updated arrival schedule, then you know it's been picked up and is on it's way.
I wish it was simpler, but after all these years, this is the process that seems to catch 99% of these errors.
Thanks for your patience. I am anxious as well and want everyone to be happy with what took over 1 and 1/2 years to bring to the market.
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