Analogistical

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

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Origin Story – 13

    One peak season at Gibson was sufficient. In the Spring of 2002, Scott Flack and Steve Mattingly helped us find our next home – we had a better sense of what we were looking for than we had the prior year.  This time we knew that we needed a standard dock. We needed clear height suitable for racks. We needed a space that could support a forklift.

    We toured some locations here and there around Austin, but nothing clicked until we pulled up to 1305 E. 6th Street. “Guerrero Produce” according to the tiles across the face of the building. On the other side of the iron bars and sliding glass doors we walked into a true big room. This one had something like 25 or 30 foot clear height and two or three proper dock doors. On the left was two stories of offices – dingy on the bottom and businessy up top. Like a fine haircut.

    It had been some time since any produce had been distributed from this building. Outside the dock doors there was about as much space unenclosed but under roof as there was in the four walls of the building. All of this area was dock-high with the parking lot set down below and the full area was enclosed by a barbed wire fence.

    The roofed area outside the four walls needed a lot of cleanup – pigeon poop blanketed the grounds. but seated in one of the concrete seams, cutting through the white sheet, a single pepper was growing – some spicy life in the midst of the detritus. Pepe the pepper. (Wash before consuming.)

    Jef saw Pepe. Jef photographed Pepe. Jef declared that we had found our new warehouse: Guerrero.

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  • Origin Story – 12

    Michael Pelletier changed everything when he introduced us to Eli Goldratt, the Theory of Constraints, and The Goal. Before that there was a whole lot of whimsy driving “what to improve next?” How many Cubiscans were sold because waving a wand, so to speak, is cooler than using a ruler. (I’m not saying that Cubiscans aren’t great right now – I have no idea – but they didn’t address the constraints on our receiving floor 15 years ago.)

    One of my early bad ideas that didn’t solve the problem that didn’t need solving was the “calendar dispensing work table”.

    Step 1 – get yourself a solid core door and build a proper work table.
    Step 2 – make that table dispense calendars to you the way a napkin dispenser dispenses napkins.

    See – you’ve got a column in the middle of the table with a spring loaded platform that maintains a consistent light to moderate pressure up, and a lid on top of the column with enough friction to keep the top calendar in place until you lightly pull it toward you. (There weren’t any cross-disciplinary classes between Classics and Engineering at Davidson)

    I finally conceded that it was sufficient just to stack a case-worth of calendars on your work table and pack from that. And I didn’t even have to read The Goal to finally conclude that this was arguably the best way forward.

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  • Origin Story – 11

    We quickly learned that Sharpied order numbers paired with manual keystrokes was not a secure approach. What to do? Well, M.O.M.’s default packing slip format was a perforated sheet – the top half was a packing slip and the bottom half had two labels you could print on and peel – allowing for billing and shipping address labels to print out at the same time as the packing slip, if that’s your thing. It was not our thing. But we put a barcode on one of those labels and started sticking those on the outside of the containers prior to closing the container. Then we’d scan the order number into HarveySoft and click through for our label. But those sheets of label paper were a lot more expensive than the plain paper they replaced. And we were using Crystal Reports and not the default M.O.M. packing slip template, so we later had another pass where we replaced the M.O.M.-supplied label paper with some custom paper we had made that had a small, barcode-fitting label in the top right of the sheet, and we started custom ordering that paper for our packing slips. But less expensive is still expensive. Finally, I think it was Steve Terry‘s suggestion that we print the barcode on a plain sheet, AND WAIT TO CLOSE THE PACKAGE UNTIL AFTER WE SCAN IT. That’s a money idea right there. Brilliant. (We met Steve touring Calendar Club at around the time we were moving into Interchange – That’s also when we met Alan Katzberg)

    Steve made his suggestion at just the right time. We weren’t ready for it when we were in Gibson, or even at our next building, the more-warehousey Guerrero. 1. We needed conveyor to transport and stage open packages and stayflats – it wouldn’t do to transport open boxes if the means of transport was a big bin. 2. One of the main shipping containers was a cardboard wrap, and there was no transporting that prior to close – but by the time of Steve’s suggestion, we’d replaced the wrap with a stayflat, and, together with the conveyor, we could stage a bin of upright stayflats with the tops of the sheets sticking out.

    So it wasn’t that it was necessarily a novel idea to scan a barcode on the slip, but it wasn’t really feasible on day one, and we needed help revisiting and retesting the assumptions of day 1 and considering if yesterday’s requirements were still true.

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  • Origin Story – 10

    St. Ignatius of Loyola had his daily examen for the Jesuits. If I were establishing a practice for Amplifier, it might be four questions: What do we do? What do we not do? What should we no longer do? What ought we start doing? The answers to these questions have changed a lot over the years at Amplifier. From the start we were sorting through these questions – the original idea was to connect content creators with service providers, and we quickly realized that we ought to do work in the physical space. move atoms not just bits, as Jef might say. So when I read the Domestic Mail Manual, I was like, “I think I’ve got a handle on this presort thing. We should mail Despair’s catalog.”

    This whole episode is a big of a fever dream to me, so I’m pretty spotty on the specifics. We learned a lot of lessons with wide eyes and muttered expletives. Lessons I recall: address ink can smudge on glossy mailers. Depending on the imposition of the mailer, and how it enters the postal machine, you might need to tab that mailer. It turns out people had learned these things before us and there’s ways to address these and other considerations. We had bought a CASS-certifying, presort software that took the Despair mailing list, cleaned it up with Zip+4, requested clarification when suites/Apts numbers were missing, and sorted/grouped the addresses in the pre-sort fashion. Finally, it did all the needed paperwork for submitting pre-sort mailings to the USPS. We had bought a printer that would take these addressees from the software and print the addresses directly onto mailers. The solution we set up at Gibson was found wanting – printer jams and poor ink adhesion – we tried a conveyor to increase the dwell time before the mailers piled up on top of each other. I think we mounted a hair dryer to flash cure the ink. None of this was providing the needful. Jud called a guy, and we ended up in the showroom of the place where we had bought the printer after hours on a friday or saturday night using the floor models of their machines. I think we ended up printing on a label and applying the label to the mailer. I think we were sending 30,000 mailers. And we did it. Somehow, we decided to do it again the next year, and I think that count was 300K mailers. We definitely ejected prior to completion the second year and handed the job off to Texas Mailhouse.

    What do we not do? We learned early on that we don’t do pre-sort catalogs, that’s for sure. We are not a mailhouse.

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  • Origin Story – 9

    Let’s talk some more about outfitting Gibson. I’m pretty sure it was Joel who had read a book about how at Amazon, they used doors on saw horses for desks. So when we were getting set up in the apartment, we had bought a door for everyone, a chop saw, and some 2x4s, and built some saw horses and set the doors on them. Desks.

    But at Gibson we were operating. and desks were for dilettantes. We needed Work Tables. (I must not have read the Global Industrial catalog too closely because apparently I was unaware that one could purchase finished work tables.) We went to Home Depot and bought some SOLID CORE doors. and some 4x4s for legs. and plywood, more 2x4s, lots of burly nuts and bolts, and a drill press. Jud had a very dangerous table saw that he loaned for the cause. I also seem to have forgotten that one can buy graph paper because I drew my own. And drew the plans for our work tables. and then built our work tables. This took a while – but this was taking place prior to us taking over the Despair fulfillment, so I had some time.

    For Despair’s poster storage, we picked up some map drawers at T.O.P.S. (Texas Office Products & Supply) over on East Fifth. We built a little caddy for those drawers to sit on so that we could roll them around as needed.

    In the front Jef and Joel had installed a restaurant booth – as in a full booth: table, seat on either side. I think it was pretty much the same booth as they had at Trudy’s down at Lamar and Ben White. There was a season where every meal Jef ate was a Trudy’s meal. I don’t think I’m misremembering this.

    I don’t think that booth made it out of Gibson. But those work tables lasted forever (give or take). I think Macon finally tossed the last two of them into a roll off dumpster a few years back. Maybe Ron took some?

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  • Origin Story – 8

    Whatever the order composition, we found a way to make what was needed and pack the orders. I’m pretty sure we made a summary Crystal Report that had a master pick for a given set of orders, then we packed the individual orders from that master pick. Sort of a replen from storage to a single forward pick location that was a table or bin. We would pack an order, write the M.O.M. order number on the shipping container with a Sharpie, and close the container with the packing slip inside. Thanks to the amazing catalog and Global Industrial, we had acquired a hard-sided mail cart. We would toss packed, closed packages into the mail cart and wheel it over to the shipping station, where we were running HarveySoft. We’d then reach in the mail cart, and pull out a package. We’d find the Sharpied order number, type it in, Harvey would query M.O.M. and pull up the Ship-To Address, the carrier, and the service. Click it through, and we’d get our thermal shipping label.

    Similar to UPS, we had set up an account with USPS and had our own permit number. I read the Domestic Mail Manual. We registered our account at the Bulk Mail Center up on Crosspark Dr. I forget his name, but the fellow in charge of permit numbers came down, watched our process, and validated our system prior to approving our permit number. Our end of day process for USPS involved printing the manifest from HarveySOFT, printing a check with the total postage for the manifest, and handing off the packages, check, and manifest to TransDel, a courier with a box truck and lift gate who would run everything up to the Bulk Mail Center and deliver the goods, manifest, and check. Maybe we transmitted the manifest to USPS digitally? We must have. I don’t remember. I also don’t remember how the tracking number emails went out, whether from us or from Yahoo Store. The digital side of things was Jud’s domain. I think he had gone back to UT for the fall to finish his History degree.

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  • Origin Story – 7

    Ok – back to systems. M.O.M. was necessary but not sufficient. We also needed HarveySoft – a multi-carrier shipping software. After M.O.M. hooked up with Harvey[Soft], we were in a position to keep track of inventory, process orders, and print shipping labels – a generative software relationship. With Harvey we could ship via USPS, UPS and FedEx through the same interface.

    We would batch orders based on the fulfillment line. And the fulfillment lines generally had to do with make-ready. Are these poster orders that we need to roll? Do we need to make desktoppers? (Desktoppers were Despair notecards in a 5×7 frame. for your desktop.) Despair was a great client – for all of the Amplifier amplification reasons, but also because early on we contended with make-ready questions – If I’ve got 125 frames, 150 panes of glass, and 108 easel-backs, do I make 100 Procrastination desktoppers based on last week’s demand? But now some sly exec decides he wants to send 50 Mistakes desktoppers to his team after a failed launch, and I’ve got all of my capital tied up in Procrastination. On the poster front, there’s no pre-rolling the poster orders – everyone wants Consulting, but the +1 posters span the catalog, and an order’s posters get rolled together. There’s a way through all of these puzzles, but we were just learning that the puzzles existed.

    The packing slip print / sort was how we set the cadence for the fulfillment work. The packing slip printing was slow, but not the constraint given our labor – it was slower to pick/pack than it was to print a packing slip. I don’t recall if it was out of the gate, but we quickly moved to Crystal Reports as the means for generating/formatting our packing slips. 

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