Analogistical

Concept and percept within the context of third party logistics. Showing my work.

  • Origin Story – 23

    Somehow Sam Koski smuggled wisdom into my high school head in a way that has shaped my thinking ever since. I think he teaches at Doral Academy now, but, back in the day, he made the math and computer departments at Miami Springs Senior High elite. I can’t overstate his excellence.

    There were so many lessons. One was an emphasis on understanding. The goal is to derive technique from understanding. Technique without understanding is just memorization. And, in my opinion, you’d be better served memorizing poetry.

    Another lesson was that there’s more than one pointer to a referent. A quadratic equation and a parabola can point to the same referent. And Mr. Koski demanded that we be able to see the parabola when we saw the equation, and the equation when we saw the parabola. And if we moved the parabola, that we visualized the shift in the corresponding equation. That we recognize that there’s different ways of saying the same thing. or, relatedly, that there’s different paths for solving a given problem – and you should consider which route you want to take.

    In the early days of Amplifier, I was responsible for both the operations and the financial sides of things. (John Scarborough and Macon Stokes would later wear these two hats more capably and in far more complicated cirumstances.) For everything we did, there was an operational representation of the thing and a financial respresentation of the thing. (There was also a digital representation, but this was mostly Jud’s domain then.) There was a mooring effect to be tethered operationally to the finances, and financially to the operations. Starting in 2003, I had less to do with operations, and more than I could do in the finances. This was an unsteady place for me.

    ,

  • Origin Story – 22

    We toured Calendar Club over off Burleson and Montopolis in anticipation of moving into Interchange. Calendar Club was optimized for fulfilling calendars, and we were expecting a huge season of shipping calendars in response to Despair’s big catalog mailing. As I mentioned before, we met Steve Terry on this tour as well as Alan Katzberg. Alan Katzberg owns A K Equipment Co and could supply us with all of our racking needs.

    Unlike Guerrero, Interchange did not have any leftover racking piled outside the building for us to use. We were outfitting a big, clean room, and Alan Katzberg gave us the plan.

    We set up the west side of the warehouse to have racks running north to south – I think we started with four rows. Then we left some space on the floor in the middle. On the east side we had our forward pick with gravity roller conveyors running north to south with gravity flow shelving on the west side of the conveyor and standard shelving on the east side of the conveyor. At the south end we had shipping stations with terminals and scales, and finally some gravity conveyor from the shipping station to shipdock staging.

    ,

  • Origin Story – 21

    2003 was a busy year for Amplifier. I think this is the year we started doing business as Amplifier instead of our Delaware Corp name Copernica, Inc. This is also the year that Despair planned to grow its peak-season marketing from mailing 300K mailers to 3 million catalogs – Amplifier was not involved in physically mailing these catalogs, but we did understand that we were going to need to scale our customer service operations and our fulfillment operations to address this order-of-magnitude-level growth.

    To accommodate the growth, we started looking for some real warehouse space. With Scott Flack’s and Steve Mattingly’s help, we ended up signing a lease at 800 Interchange Blvd – a few miles east of Guerrero. “Interchange”, our fourth home, started as the middle suite, 102, of the property which had 3 south-facing suites and 3 north-facing suites. Ours was center-south-facing and 30,000 square feet. Interchange was our first proper warehouse in a proper warehouse district. Nothing sexy (unless warehouse decor is your thing).

    Joel’s brother, Austin Bush, came on board, and he took over running the operations from me at this point; I was taking care of all of the finance matters. Not so much because I was qualified to do so, but because someone had to do it. This was where the lessons began to take hold that the story on the data side really needed to match the story on the actual operations side. Because we’re paying money and asking for money based on what the data says we did, and it better be what we actually did. And there’s a lot of ways that fiction can take hold in that story.

    ,

  • Origin Story – 20

    Credit card processing was a significant barrier to entry for small brands wanting to get started online in the early 2000s. In turn, it was a barrier to our growth as an e-commerce fulfillment provider in the small business space. Paypal was just getting started, Stripe wouldn’t be around for a while yet, and the established, institutional merchant banks was still trying to figure out which boxes to check on their forms for this new domain of online transactions. When we would create a new merchant bank account for a Yahoo Store, we would receive a package in the mail with an embossed metal plate with our account info – to be used in one of those carbon-copy credit card imprinter swipe-accross-and-back machines. Also in the package would be the carbon copy sheets for said machine and some MasterCard/Visa/Amex decals for us to post on our windows – that is, the glass windows near the front door of our office.

    So one of the services we offered was a shared-Yahoo Store across the clients who needed to use our merchant services. Bob’s Honky Tonk was still hosted at bobshonkytonk.com, for example, but if you went to the store section, and clicked on a product, at that point you’d see the product page for the product that was for sale on the shared Amplifier Yahoo Store. Add it to your cart, and you’re in Amplifier’s Yahoo Store cart. Check out, and Amplifier’s merchant bank account would process the payment.

    For our merchant services clients (I don’t remember what the real name for this service was), we would settle monthly, sending these clients a statement and a check for their Yahoo Store revenue, less our fees. In this case, too, we would use Crystal Reports sitting on top of a MySQL database that I was running locally. I’d export sales from Yahoo Store and import them into MySQL as the basis for the statements.

    ,
    , ,

  • Origin Story – 19

    We got an early lesson in the traps of units of measure. Units of measure are the dimensional characteristics of an item – length, width, height, weight, Pallet/Case/Inner Pack/Each, conversion qty (how many Eaches per unit), etc. I don’t remember how M.O.M. handled Units of Measure – I know that we didn’t handle them all that well. As I’ve mentioned, we were picking off of paper, and it’s hard even to read line-item quantity accurately in the hurly-burly. So, we had set up the formatting on our Crystal Reports packing slip to highlight a line where qty > 1 on the pack-slip. With the hopes that it would demand attention from the packer.

    One of our early clients had an important presentation with a very large retailer, and the client put in a large order for cases of all of their products to ship overnight to the attention of our client’s CFO at his hotel somewhere in the midwest. Unfortunately, instead of a case per product, we sent an each per product – a handful of small bottles. This was a grave error.

    I honestly don’t remember how we messed this up. I think maybe we were clever and had set up some formatting in the report that converted an Each quantity to a Case quantity on the packing slip – So I suspect the slip said 1 CASE, with a big qty 1. I do remember the pain of the error. 

    It would be another three or four years before we had Manhattan Associates warehouse management in the mix, and a few more years yet before we more fully availed ourselves of its controls around units of measure.

    I smile when I get a package from Amazon – a case that sells as an each – with a white label stating “THIS IS A UNIT – DO NOT BREAK OPEN.” It’s a tricky problem with lots of solutions. And solutions have implications. How do I keep track of inventory? Can an item’s state flow between pallets, cases, inner-packs, and eaches and back again? How do the pickers, who have been on the job 2 hours, validate that they have the correct item and unit of measure and correct quantity of said unit of measure? There’s lots to say about units of measure. But we learned back in 2002 that they exist.

    ,
    , , ,

  • Origin Story – 18

    There’s chipboard and there’s corrugate. Corrugate is fluted and multi-layered. Chipboard is single-ply and dense – what’s used on a toothbase carton or cereal box. We would insert a corrugate pad into the calendar prior to shrink wrapping it. This would give the calendar the backbone it needed to keep its shape when the shrink wrap constricted around it, otherwise the calendar would curl up within the wrap. Chipboard was not stiff enough to provide the necessary infrastructure for shrink wrapping.

    Despite all of this, somehow, institutionally, we called the corrugate inserts chipboard for as long as we shrink wrapped calendars. At least once, our misdefinition resulted in us ordering chipboard instead of corrugate pads. This is how I know that chipboard was insufficient. Nevertheless, we persisted in our broken speech.

    One Saturday during peak season in 2002, when we were up against the shipping cutoff coming in the next week, we ran out of chipboard (corrugate).

    More precisely, we ran out of loose chipboard (corrugate). We had a couple of pallets of the soon-to-be-prior-year 2002 calendars that were already shrink wrapped. We were faced with a few options: 1. Wait for a chipboard (corrugate) delivery on Monday. 2. Open the 2002 calendars, pull the chipboard (corrugate) out, and use the chipboard (corrugate) on the new 2003 calendars. 3. Shrinkwrap the 2003 calendar to the already shrink wrapped 2002 calendars.

    We made a phone call, and Despair started running a limited-time promotion: Shipments with 2003 calendars will get the bonus of the 2002 Demotivator Collection. And we shrink wrapped the new calendar to the old calendar. Problem solved. (Nevermind the additional weight.)

    ,

  • Origin Story – 17

    Most of our shipments in those days were calendar shipments. Accordingly, we added shrink wrapping to our set of make-ready services.

    We bought a red shrink wrap machine and worked on figuring out how to use it. There were a handful of variables to consider when setting up your shrink wrap machine: 1. weight of the shrink wrap film – that is, the thickness. 2. Width of the shrink wrap film roll. 3. the amount of time the film-cutting arm was adhered to the magnet – that is, the cadence of the machine holding down the L-bar cutting arm against the heated cutting element – a function of the weight of the film. 4. the dwell time in the oven that shrank the shrink wrap – that is, the speed of the conveyor that carried the product through the oven – like a pizza in a pizza oven at Costco. 5. the temperature of the oven.

    Considerations: too heavy a film, and it might curl the calendar. Too light a film, and it might tear along the seam when it shrank. Too long a dwell time, and it might scorch the product. Too short a dwell time or too little heat, and you might have a loose wrap around the product. The heating element that cut the film to size would become misshappen over repeated use/heatings, resulting incomplete cuts, holes in the seal. The teflon tape that pushed the film against the heating element would burn through and need to be replaced. The rollers on the conveyor through the oven would burn down over time. oh, entropy, you cruel mistress.

    I remember we got a weed-eater when I was in like fourth or fifth grade. I was so excited to use it, and quickly found some South Florida weeds to destroy. For about 5 minutes. And then I was done, never wanting to use the weed-eater again. Unfortunately, somehow, I was expected to weed-eat at a regular cadence. My relationship with the shrink wrap machine followed a similar, swift trajectory from “this is super cool” to “I really don’t want to do this any more.”

    So like Tom Sawyer, we recruited friends of Amplifier to come in to help with the shrink wrapping: Chris Fisher, Ricardo Avila, John Scarborough, it’s a long list. Man. Shrink wrapping. SMH.

    ,
    ,

  • Origin Story – 16

    In the early days, we had a mix of client-supplied, branded shipping containers and stock shipping containers. Austin Foam Plastics – AFP – produced our branded, custom-sized boxes for Despair. We had the calendar mailer (a wrap), the mug box, the master shipper (fit calendars + non-poster/non-calendars), and the litho-combo (a long rectangular prism that fit a poster tube and allowed for calendar-width items). We expanded from there to add the Junior Master Shipper – fit multiples of calendars/desktoppers/stickypads, but at half the height. We had cardboard inserts that secured the mug within the mug box, and we later moved on to foam stabilizers.

    For our stock boxes, we initially purchased from EconoBox, but moved on from there – I think – to AFP, but ultimately to Uline.

    A major containerization improvement that I’ve already mentioned is when we moved from cardboard wraps for calendars to stayflats for calendars. Despair printed full color stayflats that looked great, and, operationally, sealing a stayflat is much better than taping a cardboard wrap.

    There’s a relationship between marketing and revenue. There’s also a relationship between marketing and physics. And physics and cost. So, a promotion along the lines of “All Black Friday orders get a free Pessimist’s Mug!” or “Last day to order before Christmas – spend $30 and get a Procrastination poster!” add meaningful costs in packaging, labor, and postage – assuming we have enough of the packaging necessary for the shipment. All of the sudden, straight forward, compact calendar-into-stayflat shipments become bulky Master Shipper or Litho-combo shipments with tubes, void-fill and pallets of staged boxes. Maybe we unloaded some surplus mugs, but at what cost? It’s really important that all of the cost signals are functioning.

    A fulfillment operation without a nervous system can rot away before the decision makers realize it.

    ,
    ,

  • Origin Story – 15

    Let’s consider how we ate at Guerrero. At Gibson we had been down the street from Trudy’s and down the block from Casa Garcia’s. At Post West Avenue, we had Frank & Angie’s, Hut’s, and the newly opened Opal Divine’s. At Guerrero we had Cisco’s, Cafe Mundi, and Nuevo Leon.

    We would have an Amplifier Friday breakfast meeting at Cisco’s. In the side dining room at the lacquered circle table. Cisco’s was on the next block east of us. Most of the regulars, as I recall, seemed to be law enforcement, legislators, reporters, and locals. The secret tip was ordering your breakfast taco with the tortilla toasted – the tortilla toasts on the stove burner, top and bottom, for a beat. And by breakfast meeting, I mostly mean that we ate breakfast.

    We would also have meetings over at Cafe Mundi. Cafe Mundi was a coffee shop on the north side of Fifth Street, also a few blocks east. The Fifth Street that ran in front of Mundi at this point was a glorified alley – one lane. Buildings on the north and gravel, grass, and railroad tracks on the south. My memory of Cafe Mundi is strongly associated with a patchouli smell masking body odor. I don’t think this is a controversial characterization. We would have our meetings outside, in the circulating air.

    Nuevo Leon was a Tex-Mex institution, also a few blocks east on Sixth Street. RIP.

    Finally, I want to recognize El Milagro, purveyors of fine tortillas and tortilla chips. They made their goodness a few blocks west of Guerrero on the north side of Sixth. Totopos is tortilla chips in Spanish. In Greek, one converts a noun into its superlative form by appending -tatos to the end. My buddies Andrew Letizia, Andrew Holbrook, Brent Gilbert, and I would shove together non-greek words with greek modifiers to best express ourselves. Perisnackirizoh. I snack around – gather food from this plate and that plate. Perisnackirizite! Snack Around! (imperatively). The El Milagro tortilla chips are the totopotatos. The greatest of all tortilla chips. This, also, is not a controversial characterization.

    ,

  • Origin Story – 14

    I think there might have already been racks at Guerrero – I’m pretty sure there were. We set up racks and they came from somewhere – I think from stacks of uprights and beams under the overhang that had been left behind by Guerrero Produce. I think this is around when Sam Degelia started helping us out with all matters related to general contracting and building/fixing things – but he might be Gibson-era. (Gibson had required a lot of work.) At Guerrero, we set up full size racks along the perimeter of the enclosed portion of the warehouse. We also had racks along the walls of the covered but open area. We positioned some great-looking, artisinal, sturdy work tables in the middle of the room. And we had a good amount of floor space open for staging that which needs staging.

    Not only did Guerrero have dock-high doors, it even had an second-floor interior pallet-size opening that gave the offices upstairs pallet-access to the warehouse. The second floor office area was a big room with reinforced concrete floors, but with only like 15 foot ceilings, not the 30ish foot ceilings we had in the warehouse area. But it could definitely handle whatever we could forklift up to it.

    Now we needed a forklift.

    One of the spaces we had toured prior to settling on Gibson was further east on 6th Street – next to the Post Office. Where Cuvee Coffee later set up shop. When we had toured through there, there was a forklift among the debris of the unoccupied space. Once we settled in to Guerrero, we reached out to the owner of that space and he sold us the forklift. A flatbed drove it down the street to us, and we were in business. We had someone out to service our new acquisition: “Oh, I know this forklift! I worked on it at so-and-so, and then it was over at so-and-so.” I don’t remember the details. But it was a 1977 model. A year older than me. I was almost if not already 24 years old. This was 24 years ago. I’ve lived as much of my life with a forklift as I’ve lived without one. Time is weird.

    ,