Recently in PLS Observations Category

Normally, my company is able to do a good job of meeting or exceeding people’s expectations for order fulfillment. We certainly try. Even during this crazy time of year, when there’s a ton of mailings, nearly all of them unusual, often under-specified, and with lots of people stressed out over sending the order a week or three later than they’d hoped, we’re keeping up (if barely, and with somewhat less sleep than usual on the part of myself and Christine, but as well as or better than past years).

Yesterday, though, an order took a turn for the strange. This particular order had been submitted the day before at 3:28pm. That’s after our mostly-unofficial cut-off for the day (3:00pm), and there were no special instructions about it being a rush, so we went through our normal practice of waiting ‘til the next morning to work on it.

Mid-morning the next day, we get an E-Mail from the customer asking how backlogged we are, how long it will take to get his letters sent, and whether it would be faster for him to send them himself. An hour later, having just talked through the (moderately complex) order with Kevin, I reply saying that we’re not backlogged, and are working on setting up his mailing now. Assuming there’s no delay in approving the order, we’d have the letters sent that day.

Nothing weird so far, but then the next E-Mail arrives. “I think I’ll send this mailing myself” (to get it out sooner). Err, what? So, I send back a reply, asking if he’s sure, and repeating that we shouldn’t have any trouble getting the mailing sent within a few hours. Maybe he’d misread the original E-Mail. But another reply comes in, saying he’s sure, so I cancel the order.

I’m guessing there must have been some other issue. It was admittedly a small list, so it’s technically possible that if he dropped everything and started work on them right away, he could have gotten the mailing sent before we would, assuming he could produce 4x6 photos at a nearby 1-hour lab with no delays during the busiest time of year, and assuming he already had a pile of the specialty reply envelopes he’d requested, along with the normal paper, envelopes, and stamps. It only would have taken us roughly 10 minutes to send his mailing, including the photo printing, but he wasn’t at the head of the queue at the time, so it would’ve been an hour or two before it got to the printing stage.

Even so, it wouldn’t have mattered — at least in this area, it makes no difference if I mail something at 7am or 8pm; it’ll still go out that day in the ~11:30pm truck. I assume the same is true where he lives (if anything, he’d probably have a 5pm cutoff), and his recipients were spread out around the country, such that there wouldn’t be any major savings geographically.

That one may very well take the cake for oddest customer interaction of the year.

Kevin does nearly all of the proofreading now (nearly all = I proof roughly one letter a month), so there has been a definite shortage of quotable PLS Observations here lately.

However, we just got a file that opens on my computer and not his, so I got to witness this one:

[So and so] is a large animal vet.

Nicely ambiguous. I added a hyphen.

I am a quaint old innkeeper; I keep this quaint old inn.
— Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice.

Here’s the main reason why my file naming scheme can never be to just use the names that my customers use:

• June08prayerltr.pub
• Response Sheet.docx
• May Letter - year in review.doc
• June 2008 prayer letter postcard.pub
• june 08.pub
• June 08 PL.pub
• June, 2008.doc
• June 2008a.doc
• May_June Prayer Letter.pdf
• Update June.pdf

These are all files that I have open right now.

This is pretty common throughout a given month. If I stuck all of those in the same directory, and tried pulling up the one I needed, it would be a disaster waiting to happen, besides the fact that I’d be constantly overwriting files.

Since I’ve started, I’ve been using lastname-YYYY-MM-DD.pdf (or .doc, or .pub, or whatever), and for the past few years, I’ve been creating a new directory for each month (named YYYY-MM), which is somewhat redundant with the filename, but it works, and I could combine the directories if I needed to, without running into problems.

It has a couple of drawbacks. It breaks down at the end of each month, when some files get submitted for a mailing on the last day of the month, and more files on the first of the next. Not a big deal, but it means going back and forth between directories, or just having files in the wrong directory.

Also, last year, I started running into the problem where two people with the last name (Smith, which should be no surprise to anyone) would send letters on the same day. So, in those cases, I appended the first letter of the first name to the list (so, smithj for a fictitious John Smith).

Then, there was the family where the parents are missionaries and so is at least one of the kids, and they both submitted letters on the same day, and they have the same first initial. So much for that solution.

When I got three Smiths on the same day, it was clearly time to think up a new naming scheme.

I haven’t implemented it yet, but my current plan is to have the software create and populate one directory per customer, with a “Common Files” directory (for signature images, frequently-used response cards, etc.) and one additional directory per mailing. Then, since the computer’s doing all the work and not me, I’m also planning on having it create file system links for all of the active (and maybe recently finished) mailings in another directory, so I’ll be able to work out of the one directory, and still have an easily-accessible archive.

That should help address the fairly rare case when I’m accidentally working in the wrong month’s directory, and open last month’s letter, or something like that. It’ll also mean fewer files to sort through on a daily basis, since the server will be archiving all of the finished files out of sight.

Our Father in heaven has given [a gift] to me through God-fearing bothers that he placed in my life…

bothers -> brothers

Or, at least, so I hope, given that a later sentence is:

He is putting me into a position to do the same…

Although, he did make the same typo a little earlier, writing:

…he placed me into the hands of my Big bother T___…

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.

Together we welcomed a Boy Scout group who brought in rabbits and made cages for them out of bamboo, a new missionary family from Texas, and a team of eight from Korea.

Introducing the garden path sentence. The most obvious/immediate reading of the above is that the Boy Scout group made cages out of bamboo, an unsuspecting southern family, and a bunch of Asians.

Never underestimate the be-preparedness of Boy Scouts!

Ok. [deep breath]. I think I can go back to reading that letter now, and I think I’m going to change the order of who got welcomed so that the Boy Scouts and their rabbits are last.

Here is the question of the week: Can you scare the daylights out of evil spirits by shooting a machine gun at them? We recently attended a funeral here and apparently at least one of those present thought the answer to the question was yes. His answer was incorrect, but I do have to say that it did make for a lively graveside service.

I bet!

Another new staff member is a recent graduate of _ State University. [New Staff Member] is developing his ministry partner team in _ and is cursing right along.

“cursing” and “cruising” are very different words. :-)

On one of my printers, I’ve only printed 3 black and white pages in three months. And it’s not as though I haven’t used it (the color count is quite a bit higher).

Even Xerox did a double-take on that one. The billing web site did the rough equivalent of saying “you’ve got to be kidding.” (Ok, so it said “value is outside of historical range”, but in computer-speak, that’s roughly the same thing.)

The largest section of my codebase is devoted to the parsing of mailing lists. It would be a rather small portion of the overall code if people were consistent, but people are anything but consistent when it comes to how they organize their mailing lists.

For example, the first time that most people get an international address on their list, their system breaks down, because they don’t have a “country” column. The strange thing is that it doesn’t occur to most people to just add a country column, and put the name of the country in that column.

What most people do is move the city, state/province, and postal code to the “street 2” line (if they have one), and put the country in the city or zip column. If they don’t have a “street 2”, then the city, state/province, and postal code end up in the city column (best case), and country ends up in the zip column.

Then you come across the educated folks who know that in a variety of countries (e.g. Germany), the numeric postal code comes before the city, rather than after. In that case, as a favor to whoever’s doing their mailings, they put the postal code in the city column, the city in the state column, and the country in the zip code column. That way, you can still merge “City State Zip” in that order, and it shows up more or less properly.

Except that my code knows about various countries’ address formats, and already does that swap, with the result that, in this case, the country would end up in the middle of the address.

Sorting all of that out and getting things back in the right fields involves no small bit of code, especially when all of this is being done automatically, and I’ve become a whole lot more familiar with the postal quirks of dozens of countries over the past few years as a result. :-)

Oh, and don’t get me started on the people who know that in Chinese, you write the address from most-general to most-specific, instead of the other way around. (You don’t do that for Chinese addresses that are written in English, but most people, if they know the former, don’t know the latter.) When the name of the person who’s receiving the letter shows up in the zip code column, all hope is lost.

Still, most of the time, the software is able to import mailing lists without a hitch, nowadays. I’m quite proud of it, all told.

And yet, there’s still the occasional list that causes the program to die a horrible death. Such as the one that came in yesterday, which has a first name, spouse, and last name field (which I’m ready for — take first, add “and” and spouse, and append last).

In this list, when the person listed churches, he put the entire name of the pastor in the first name field, which also isn’t that big a deal, and the software can cope with it — split out the words in the first name field and apply them to title, last, and suffix based on patterns established by many tens of thousands of other addresses. Apply the “and spouse” rule after that.

Unfortunately, he then put the entire name of the associate pastor in the spouse field, which just doesn’t work, even beyond the mental imagery associated with that choice of columns. And never mind that some of the names are going to run off the edge of the envelope (e.g. when several members of the missions committee are listed as the last name).

Alas, some things still need to be done by hand.