Analogistical

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

  • Origin Story – 26

    ok – at around the same time the Livestrong wristbands were about to become a thing, we were in Plano visiting Morgan’s family. Morgan, her dad, and I went over to Arbor Hills Nature Preserve, and on a whim I tried to cross the monkey bars at the playground there. To my dismay, I could hardly get past the first couple of rungs. I think, at 26 years old, this was my first real brush with mortality and decline. I did not like it.

    A few months into the Livestrong project, Jason Webster came on board at Amplifier on the tech side of things. Jason was also a Muay Thai fighter and trainer, having lived and trained in Thailand. And brushing against him would also be a brush with mortality. I shared my predicament with Jason, and his solution was kettlebells and Pavel Tsatsouline. I remember the first time he brought a 1.5 pood kettlebell up to Guerrero – Jud and I dressed out for our first lesson. I swung the bell ten times (Russian swings). put it down. went to the bathroom. vomited. Weakness leaving the body. The novice begins his journey prostrate.

    Four years later, my friend Kurt Yusi (an Army officer at the time) and Morgan’s cousin Paul (an Air Force officer at the time) both independently commended “oh, if you do kettlebells, you should check out CrossFit”. So I did. It looked well out of my reach, so I signed up for a class at CrossFit Central in May 2008. Joe Wood and I covered a lot of ground together there. It was great.

    Macon started at CrossFit Central in 2010 or so, and between the two of us, we started accumulating a good amount of equipment. In 2013, or so, we realized we had enough equipment between us to set up our own gym, so we did so in a corner of Amplifier. We both got our CrossFit certifications, Macon made an LLC so that we could get insurance, and we started offering CrossFit classes for anyone who wanted to join at the warehouse or in its orbit. Our most recent class was two hours ago.

    I can handle a jungle gym now.

    ,

  • Origin Story – 25

    Amplifier scaled up in 2003 to accommodate Despair’s large catalog drop, but 2004 and the LAF/Livestrong wristband work demanded a state change of an altogether different sort. It was high profile work for a high profile client. Athletes were wearing wristbands in the Olympics, candidates were wearing the wristbands in the presidential election, and celebrities were wearing wristbands on all of their carpets. Jud Harris knows the story firsthand, but we broke M.O.M. with the volume of orders we were processing through – the FoxPro architecture beneath it was never intended for the millions of orders flowing through. We devoted the front offices of Interchange to a call center for LAF order support, and the warehouse was full of wristbands. The rest of Amplifier’s administrative offices remained at Guerrero, the prior office.

    The mercy of the work was that there was really just the one sku – a yellow wristband (in a ten-pack – the ten-pack was Joel’s recommendation to LAF at the outset, and it made all the difference). And that sku weighed very little, cost very little, and was hard to destroy, as far as shipping goes. It was a widget if there ever was a widget.

    It was also merciful that wristband deliveries would take several weeks to arrive from overseas – and we could scale our operation at a cadence anticipating when the next, bigger delivery would arrive.

    It was a wild year of wristbands, and we survived. And we shipped tens of millions of wristbands. And, when the dust settled, we decided we needed a real warehouse management system.

    ,

  • Origin Story – 24

    Despair’s planned, big catalog drop in Q4 2003 prompted our move to Interchange, a proper warehouse, during the summer of 2003. We still had some years left on our lease at Guerrero, but we needed the larger warehouse space for our operations. And the new space served us well that peak season. Fulfillment and customer service had moved over to Interchange while everything else stayed at Guerrero.

    It was in this context of a steady footing at Interchange that the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF), later Livestrong, came on board in 2004. In partnership with Nike, they had a new initiative, a yellow wristband, that they were launching, and they needed fulfillment. This is a big story, and I’m not the one to tell the story of the Livestrong wristbands. I’m not the one to tell the story of Amplifier’s relationship with LAF. I’m just going to tell some stories from my experience during this time.

    It made all the difference that we were established in our new warehouse when the LAF opportunity came along.

    My wife, Morgan, finished her Masters in Social Work at The University of Texas in May of 2004, and she’d done a concentration in non-profit administration. One evening, early on in the LAF phenomenon and soon after Morgan finished school, I went home for dinner and said, “if you want to see me over the next few weeks, you need to come work at the warehouse with me.” I explained that we needed to hire about 100 people, and I asked her if she could do that for us. She asked me some clarifying questions about our HR policies and procedures, and I just looked at her with a blank stare.

    Morgan went back to the warehouse with me that night and became Amplifier’s first HR director. She established policies and procedures and helped us bring on the hundreds of folks we needed for the LAF 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.

    ,
    ,