Analogistical

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

  • 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.

    ,
    , , ,

  • 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.

    ,

  • 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.

    ,
    ,

  • Origin Story – 3

    Of all of us on day one, I brought the operational experience to Amplifier. You see, after my freshman year of college, I had spent the summer working at Hydraulic Supply Company in South Florida [the location off the Sawgrass Expressway]. I specialized in packing hoses, pumps, fittings, and other hydraulic supplies. When it came time to make a box and put an order’s contents into the box, I made the box and put the contents of a bin into said box. I then sent it along the line to be scanned, labeled, and closed. On the one hand, I don’t remember the specifics. On the other hand, there were not a lot of specifics.

    So, when we decided at Amplifier that we were ready to start doing things with stuff, I was like, “we need to get a pallet jack.” In retrospect, the correct order of operations is 1. get a warehouse 2. get a pallet jack. But, as I mentioned last post, Gibson had a set of double doors that could accommodate a pallet and a big room on the first floor, so who needs a warehouse. I didn’t know how one went about getting a pallet jack, so I poked around on WebCrawler and came across the phrase “Materials Handling”, and that was the jackpot. Once I learned the industry term, I found Global Industrial and ordered a pallet jack. And it came with a catalog that had everything I could think of that might belong in a warehouse, and hundreds of pages of additional stuff I’d never before considered.

    It was a narrow pallet jack. I have no recollection why I ordered a narrow pallet jack. My best guess is that I measured the standard doorway at Gibson and got a jack that would fit those doors. Unfortunately, the pallets weren’t correspondingly narrow, so our pallet storage was limited to the big room.  The big room was maybe the size of a McDonald’s dining room with a hallway and smaller rooms wrapping around it. On the second floor where we had some offices and the call center we were setting up. It was coming together.

    ,
    ,

  • Origin Story – 2

    We were using Mail Order Manager (M.O.M.) as our OMS and WMS. M.O.M. was something like $100 off the shelf at CompUSA, as I recall. “Mail Order” Manager because at this point, direct to consumer fulfillment was primarily mail-order catalog fulfillment. Despair’s e-commerce platform was Yahoo Store, and it was cutting edge. Yahoo Store had a M.O.M. formatted export, and we would export from Yahoo and import the orders into M.O.M.

    PDS had been Despair’s 3PL in Dallas. Parcel fulfillment was not their main business – most everything they were doing was pallet-based. They were happy to support us as we got our fledging 3PL off the ground, and they shared their M.O.M. configurations with us and provided us some guidance as we transitioned the Despair account from them to us.

    We started fulfilling Despair’s orders in September 2001. In to fulfillment, we also took over Despair’s customer service. Part of that included building out a call center of sorts. Dave Wiggins was on hand to punch all of the needed phone wires to make that work.

    There are things that I’m good at and things that I’m not so good at. Translating Greek – not so good. Customer Service – not so good. I would feel each caller or emailer’s problem(s) deeply and get stuck trying to solve nonsense that wasn’t mine to solve. With the help of a beer, I was lamenting all of this one night over off Speedway at the house of some college friends, Judson Sutherland and Cam Houser. “Oh, I’ll do that stuff,” Cam said. So Cam came on and took over customer service – employee three.

    ,
    , , ,

  • Origin Story – 1

    Most people don’t know what a degree in Classics is. Those that do often presume that it equips you mainly to teach Greek and/or Latin. Unfortunately, I was not a great student of Greek or Latin and had no business teaching either. And you know the saying, “those that can’t teach, do logistics.”

    We started Amplifier (doing business as Copernica, originally) back in January 2001. Jef Sewell and Joel Bush were our founders, Jud Harris was the first employee and I was the second, whatever that means. Our first office was an apartment at Post West Ave, behind the Office Depot at 5th and Lamar in Austin. Our first client was Two Birds Film, and we would ship the Two Birds DVDs and VHS tapes at the Post Office over at Guadalupe and 6th.

    Steve Mattingly and Scott Flack helped us secure our next space – “Gibson” – a two story building adjacent to the railroad tracks at the bottom of Gibson St off South Lamar. (Prior, the building had been used for testing concrete, I think.)  Having a building with a dock – of sorts- and a proper, pallet-allowing set of double doors, we were ready to take our 3PL to the next level, and Despair, Inc moved their e-commerce fulfillment from a Dallas shop to us in September of 2001.

    ,
    , , ,