Analogistical

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

  • 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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  • Origin Story – 6

    I’m not writing The History of Amplifier; I’m writing a history of Amplifier. Jef and Joel had a vision that they were implementing when they founded Copernica/Amplifier, and it’s coherent and compelling. I’m not telling that story. I’m telling the story of employee number 2 – a 22 year old who didn’t know very much about anything when Amplifier started. That’s not fair – Sam Koski taught me everything I needed to know at Miami Springs Senior High, but it was going to take a while for that knowledge to take form.

    Jef or Joel subscribed to The Believer magazine that McSweeney’s rolled out back in 2003 – and the magazines came to the office. Early on they had an article revisiting Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. (We rarely know the significance of an event in the moment – it’s in retrospect that we’re able to see the effect one sitting of bathroom reading has on a life.) [Reading the article in the stall] “There’s two thousand pages across three volumes of Soviet prison reflections?? Yes, please!” I went out to Half-Price Books and bought volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago. Since then I’ve read most everything of Solzhenitsyn’s that’s been translated into English. Recently, Notre Dame has started publishing English translations of his work that had yet to be translated – I’m very excited about this.

    I was not a Russian-Lit major – that’s a dead-end – but according to my pedestrian musing, Tolstoy took a sweeping view of history, that we are all carried along by the accumulation of every decision, and it’s an error to attribute the unfolding of time to any specific event or individual. Solzhenitsyn does not dismiss us from agency, nor does he hold to the Great Man view of individuals steering the ship this way or that, but he does believe that there’s a moral dimension to things, and that we can make good decisions and bad decisions, and that our decisions matter and are consequential. He believes that there can be a redemptive aspect to suffering, and that we can be shaped by the experiences and accounts of others. I don’t know if this is actually at all an accurate reduction of Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, but I’m going with it, and I fall in the Solzhenitsyn camp.

    So I’m writing my account of maturation in the space of third party logistics, and I don’t mean for it to be more or less than that.

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  • Origin Story – 5

    So we were wrapping up our first peak season – we called it Christmas season at the time because we weren’t yet pros – I think it was the evening of 12/23/01. Despair, Inc’s 2002 calendar was the main product for that season, and we were receiving a delivery of the second or third printing of the calendar to supply all of the post-Christmas orders that would come in. The trouble was the delivery truck didn’t have a lift gate and Gibson didn’t have a dock.

    “YO – I KNOW WHAT WE NEED TO DO.” I mean, who wants to unload a pallet case by case off a truck when you’ve got a Pallet Stacker? Because we all know, the Pallet Stacker is just going to lower that sweet, heavy pallet to the ground, just like it does when you try to lift a too-heavy pallet with the foot pedal pumping. In my defense, no one objected to my great idea.

    We pallet jacked the pallet of calendars to the edge of the truck, rolled that Pallet Stacker up, jacked it into position, and slid it in snug to the pallet. “OK. Yo. Check it. I’m going to pump this pedal real good, and you guys push the pallet off the truck.” Brilliant.

    I pumped the pedal. Got some air. They pushed. Pallet Stacker moved. Pallet was in the air. Pallet tipped over. Pallet was on the ground. not having lowered.

    It turns out there’s hydraulic capacity and that’s different than the capacity of the pallet stacker forks. And a pallet of 2002 Despair.com calendars exceeded the capacity of the Pallet stacker forks – the right fork to be precise – and it just bent way out of shape and failed to hold up its end of the bargain.

    It was a pretty clean dive, as they go. We were able to salvage most of the cases of the calendars. But the Pallet Stacker fork needed some serious welds to get back into operation.

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  • Origin Story – 4

    I was dating Morgan at the time I got my first Materials Handling catalog from Global Industrial. Sometimes I’d be like, “oh, uh, I might should go water the plant,” and would sneak away to look at the catalog. I’m pretty sure Morgan knew that I didn’t keep any plants; the only thing I was growing was her resentment toward the catalog. But it was an amazing catalog. It had stuff like short pallet racks that you could buy when you were keeping pallets in rooms that weren’t warehouses – I bought some. It also had stuff like Pallet Stackers.

    Do you know what a Pallet Stacker is? It’s a thing that stacks pallets if you don’t have the thing that normally stacks pallets (i.e. a forklift). You tend to need a pallet stacker when you’re keeping pallets in a room and not a warehouse. We fit the bill. The pallet stacker was burly and had two legs that would straddle the pallet, then two forks that would get in the right position (keeping this post PG) with respect to the pallet. Then, in the model we purchased, you would pump a foot lever and slowly lift the pallet off the ground. (Should the hydraulics have failed, I knew a guy with two thumbs who had worked in the industry.)

    The thing about the Pallet Stacker was it had a lift capacity. And if you exceeded the capacity, you might pump really hard and get a pallet off the ground, but it would slowly sink back to the ground. Next we’re going to jump ahead a few months for one of those stories where you’re like “I HAVE A GENIUS IDEA” but it turns out to be a stupid idea.

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