The Aftermath
All of the letters that I’m going to be sending before Christmas are now finished. The majority of it was over Thursday night, with a few stragglers yesterday, and one express mailing today.
The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas saw about a 50% increase in volume (loosely rounded) over the rest of the year, part of which is due to end-of-year mailings, and part of which is due to customer growth throughout the year. These past four weeks have also seen about a 50% increase in volume over the same four weeks last year.
Improvements in efficiency would have let me handle a 50% increase without much trouble if they were normal mailings, but end-of-year mailings are almost always more complex. Instead of a sheet of paper in an envelope with a stamp, it’s usually a mail-merged sheet of paper in an envelope with an insert on a particular color and weight of paper plus a reply envelope (possibly also stamped). If we’re lucky. (It’s also the time of year when we get the most unannounced packages at our door containing various objects that have no hope of going through mailing equipment. Like pens.)
As a result, I didn’t end up meeting my turnaround time goals — two business days — for a little over half of the mailings, which is somewhat disappointing, considering that during the rest of the year, I get roughly 80% of mailings finished within that timeframe. The vast majority of them still got mailed in what I would consider a reasonable timeframe — four business days — but I’d like to be able to pull off my normal turnaround time even during busy periods, especially when I know in advance that they’re going to be busy and can prepare for it.
(That said, one thing that contributed negatively to my turnaround time this past month was preparing for future growth, insofar as we’re working on getting a new house/office built before the next major busy season. But I’m going to ignore that for now.)
So, what I’m doing now is looking at what happened over the past month, looking for places where I can make improvements, and trying to figure out how I can increase efficiency and lower turnaround times, given that it’s quite possible my volume next year this time could be 150% or more of what it was this year.
Here are some of the factors that contributed this year:
Repeat after me: “Do not start house-hunting during the busiest season of the year.” Not that I had a whole lot of other options — this one is the most economical way of handling future growth, but it is unfortunate that it had to be this month. It would have been better to have gone through the whole process a month earlier, and we’d have been facing fewer time-crunch problems involving snow storms right now. On the other hand, I didn’t have the data I needed to make the house-building decision a month earlier, so that’s moot.
In any case, we’ll either be in a new house/office by next year this time, or else things will be enough in motion that I won’t need to spend countless hours working on it.
Power stacker failure. My primary inserter has a really nice doohickey at one end that creates nice piles of sealed mail, allowing us to let it run unattended while we’re working on other things. Unfortunately, the doohickey broke two weeks ago, and it took a week and a half to get fixed. The backup involves a catch tray, which requires babysitting in case envelopes don’t fall into them nicely.
Next year, I’m likely to be adding another inserter, so I’ll have a second power stacker to fall back on in case one breaks.
Christmas Concerts. Short of eliminating the sound side of the business, which I don’t want to do, there’s not much I can do about this one. I enjoy doing the concerts, at least partially because it gets me out a bit more, and provides some variety. It’s also a lot of fun watching the kids perform. So, this is just going to remain an issue, I think.
Predictions. I knew these four weeks were going to be busy, but I failed to account for the spike on week #2, which ended up catching me by surprise. Looking at the data, I could’ve predicted that it was going to be the busiest week and adjusted my schedule somewhat to anticipate that. Instead, I was overly prepared for the first week, which ended up not being as busy. The backlog that resulted from this is probably the biggest contributor to the slower turnaround time overall, because I ended up playing catch-up for the rest of the season.
Point to remember: missionaries are supposed to get their end-of-year mailings out the week after Thanksgiving. However, because they procrastinate as much as anyone else, they actually get their end-of-year mailings out a little later than that.
Complexity. I’m extremely efficient at getting one-page, non-merged letters in the mail. Short of combining machines (which is possible, but the offerings aren’t very attractive yet), there’s not a whole lot I can do to speed this up other than buying incrementally faster equipment.
The more complicated mailings that tend to come in this month still have a good bit of slower manual labor involved. Things like cutting up response cards are done fairly inefficiently, and mailings with lots of inserts need to be done at least partially by hand.
This is probably where I’ll focus most of my resources. One improvement that made a huge difference this year was having one printer for #10 envelopes, and another printer for #9 envelopes. That change alone meant that the majority of mailings didn’t require unloading, resizing, and reloading envelopes, which is fairly time-consuming. Colored envelopes and #6 reply envelopes still required more time, but that’s a smaller percentage of mailings. If I end up getting a third envelope printer next year, I’ll probably dedicate one printer to those special cases, so that both the #10 and #9 envelope printers can stay dedicated to their tasks.
Adding a good cutting machine and a larger inserter will go a long way toward streamlining the remaining bottlenecks in the process. And, conveniently, I’m getting to the point where I can actually afford them. That certainly helps.
Inventory. This was much less an issue this year than last year. But I still underestimated how many #9 envelopes I’d need to get me through the season, twice. And, unfortunately, UPS encountered delays with both shipments (one misdirected shipment, one storm). Other than that, though, I didn’t have to make any emergency orders.
It’s still something to focus on next year. I want to make sure I have enough supplies before Thanksgiving to get me through to Christmas, especially since the delivery companies are also swamped, and more prone to making mistakes that result in delays.
Picture printing. I normally get this done at Wal-Mart when I need 4x6 pictures to include in a mailing. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart had significant delays with both groups of orders that I placed with them this year — the first was a week delayed on an overnight shipment (they seem to have forgotten to actually mail it, and then sent it at a slower class of mail), and the second was two days delayed on a one-hour in-store pickup (they ran out of photo paper).
It would be nice to be able to do this in-house, but I don’t know that I could do it economically right now. I’ll probably need to continue relying on Wal-Mart next year, and re-evaluate then. Perhaps they’ll work out their own stocking/shipping issues so that it won’t be a problem.
Space. I don’t think this slowed anything down this year, or at least not significantly, but there were definitely times when there was no horizontal space to be had on any table, printer, shelf, dehumidifier, or desk, and the floor was starting to become impassable with all of the various boxes.
Other than the obvious “I need more space, overall” issue, which will get addressed one way or another before next summer, I should increase the staging area for jobs that are ready to be assembled, and get a better filing system for things that people send us to insert with their mailings so that it’s more vertical and less horizontal. Both are pretty simple and cheap to do, which is nice.
Communication. There were a lot of repeated questions that came up over the past few weeks that I should have answers for on the web site. There weren’t a lot of questions that came up that were already answered on the web site, so that’s a sign that either the information that’s there is easy to find, or that I don’t actually answer anyone’s questions on the web site, but I’ll take that as a positive sign.
I’ve been keeping notes on the questions that have been asked, so I know what I need to write. The trick will be making it easy for people to find when they need it, or, even better, to let them know before they need to look for it.
Time. Even if all of the extraneous factors hadn’t been involved, there was still more work than I could have done in the 160 business hours of the past four weeks. What actually happened is that Christine worked about half-time for the last three weeks, in addition to whatever I worked (I don’t track my own hours very well, but it’s safe to say it was more than 40 hours/week).
I’ll be able to make more efficiency improvements over the coming year, but, assuming growth next year is anything like growth this year (and I have every reason to believe it’ll be at least as much next year), I have all the data I need to be convinced that one full-time person and one part-time person won’t be able to handle it even with the new equipment. I could’ve kept another full-time person occupied this past month without any trouble.
All of the above, in addition to the various code improvements I’ve jotted down over the past few weeks, gives me plenty to work on before May, the next busy season, is here. That will be my trial run for next year’s end-of-year season.
