Status: July 16, 2010
Its been a heck of a week. What started off quiet and to plan quickly turned into the equivalent of a pinpall machine featuring me as the ball. In a nut shell some family issues (nothing serious) came up and I was the only one available to take care of it. This very suddenly chopped up the rest of my week into little bits. In addition I was dealing with the suppliers that were going on summer break at the end of this week. With what time I had left I was completing and shipping watches. A different family obligation will keep out of the office until Monday but next week will be more routine. Monday I will be back online and get to my e-mail inbox.
I will be out of the office on Tuesday. I have to travel to New York city to meet with a member of the press and a customer. The first person I am meeting is someone that I had planned on meeting while I was Europe in early June but we had to cancel the meeting at the last minute. As luck would have it he is traveling in the US and we were able to re-schedule our earlier meeting. It’s not a good time to be out of the office for a day but it is something I am looking forward to and an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.
This past week we were able to begin integrating the order status portal into the main site. Within about 2 months you should be able to access the order status portal through your Mk II web site login rather than having to access the portal separately through the blog. However for the time being please continue accessing the order status portal through the blog. We are waiting on a few more software updates before we can complete the integration of the the order status portal with the main site.
Momentarily I will post an update for the Kingston in a separate post.
Update: July 12th
I am using some new software and as a result I am writing his post for the second time 
I will be back online by Wednesday. At the moment I am preoccupied with sending out purchase orders and getting projects started/buttoned up before most the European side of the industry begins leaving on vacation at the end of this week. There isn’t a standardized time when the companies take vacation so it ends up being a complex game of coordinating and working around the various suppliers’ different vacation schedules.
I am still shipping watches and spending the rest of my time working on watches.
Quick update: July 6, 2010
I have the new order status portal up and running. The portal has been updated for orders due before July 16th.
I have to input the Tornek-Rayville orders tomorrow and I will be working on revising the work schedule during this week.
It will be a fight but I am on track to return to a normal work schedule this week.
The Kingston parts are proceeding through final QC.
Kingston: Timetable update
Currently the case components are going through their final quality control before the supplier invoices me and delivers the case parts. This is taking longer than I anticipated but what can be done to move the process along has already been done. Once the parts have arrived I will being my own quality control and check for any potential problems.
As I noted earlier this is only a portion of the shipment of cases. The rest require the case tubes that were stuck in US Customs for several weeks. I have finally confirmed that the case tubes have arrived. After a quick once over from me I will be forwarding them onto the case manufacturer for installation into the remaining case bodies. Barring any other problems with the case tubes this delay should not affect the delivery of the General Order watches. The pre-order watches’ timetable was not affected by this issue. We have enough case bodies currently going through the final QC to fill the open orders.
For the pre-order customers…I am still going through the paperwork and organizing the orders so that I can begin working on a delivery schedule and assign serial numbers. Organizing a pre-order of this size is a substantial task so it will take probably another 2-3 weeks. In the mean time I will begin inputting the orders into the new order status portal that should be going live in a day or two. When the order status portal is updated for your order you should receive an e-mail from the new system. Please note that the delivery date will not be set by this point in time. When the delivery date is set you will receive an updated sales order with the date attached and you will receive another e-mail from the order status system once the system has been updated for your delivery date.
For General Order customers…I will be going through the verification process after I complete the scheduling for the pre-order customers. I hope to be able to confirm the open orders and issue refunds as required by the end of July. A point of clarification…I am trying to allocate the watches available through the General Order to each geographic region as divided amongst the me and the dealers. The basic regions are the Asia/Pacific, European Union, Scandinavia, and N. America. My rough guess is that only customers in N. America will be affected but that is just a guess. For the General Order customers you should not expect to have to do anything until Q4 of this year.
Order Status Portal Upgrade
We will be transitioning the order status portal to a new system this week. We will be using the new order status portal for all orders placed after today. The existing orders and those placed before today will be inputted into the new system over the next week. The exception will be the Kingston orders which will be inputted into the new system by the middle of July.
What will happen:
- You may see the new order status portal go online before any information is available. There may be a lag between when the order status portal becomes visible through the blog and the time the information has been inputted into the system. Once the new portal is online the old portal will not be updated or be accessible any more.
- When your order has been inputted into the new system you will receive an e-mail from the new system. Please note that this e-mail may end up in your SPAM/Bulk Mail folder because the “address” is being “faked” to look like it is coming from our URL but is actually coming from the server that the new order status portal is hosted on.
Login credentials:
- The new system will require a separate login from the main site. Over the next few months we will do our best to integrate the order status portal into the main site so that you will only need to remember one set of login credentials. For the time being the system will operate similarly to the old one.
- I will assign you a login and password for your “first” order in the new system. You can change the password if you wish. The initial format for your login/password will be as follows:
Login: [the e-mail account your have on file with our system]
Password: [Your postal code exactly as it appears in your “billing” address” in your account information, including spaces or dashes. Please note that the new system is caps sensitive.]
The benefits of the new system include:
- You will be able to retrieve your password automatically through the portal if you have any trouble logging in.
- The new system will be easier to update and maintain
- We will be able to centralize all of the correspondence regarding an order
- This will enable us to better prioritize and respond to your inquiries and issues for open orders
- This system will also help me better manage orders and maintain situational awareness.
I believe the new system holds great promise and hope that the benefits will be as significant to you.
Customer service issues….
Well the good news is that I am finally feeling better. Not 100% yet but better and a lot closer to “normal”.
I will be working through e-mails when I am back in the office on Sunday. I finally got my overdue paperwork squared away (e.g. sales tax filing that was overdue 2 months ago) and the US Customs issue squared away.
The parts should have cleared customs earlier today. I probably won’t know if that is the case for a few more days. I ended up having to hire a broker to clear the package. The paper work to file the “formal entry” was mind numbingly laborious. I was prepared to go up to JFK but the broker was sure that that would actually end up causing more confusion and not less. So I hope that the parts will arrive some time next week.
I tried to take it easy this week so that I hopefully and finally put this sinus thing away for a while. I spent some of that time thinking hard about how customer service can be improved. I think I have come up with a long-term solution through some software that I looked into last year. At the time the software was much too expensive. I guess the recession made them re-work their pricing (or may be my memory is off) but a new pricing structure puts the package well within reach.
Essentially it is a ticketing system that will better organize and centralize our correspondence and prioritize incoming inquiries. The system also has the built in controls that will enable me to hire someone to help with the correspondence. I am going to be playing with a demo of this system over the weekend to see if I can make it work for what we need. If it looks promising I am going to push it into place as quickly as I can. I hope that we can forgo the old system and use this new system to keep track of the Kingston deliveries and orders.
The problem with the current order status system is that it is a bit out of date. The order status system was built 3-4 years ago by a friend doing me a huge favor. It has worked for a number of years but wasn’t really built to handle the volume of updates and orders that we currently handle. Updating or editing order status’ can take several minutes per entry at this point (which is several minutes longer than I can spare). Although not the primary reason this was one of the reasons why we stopped part sales.
I know this may sound like a bad time to do order status system update but looking forward to what needs to be delivered it is probably the best time to do it. With the number of Kingston watches to deliver we will need a more robust platform and something that can be updated more easily and quickly.
I wil be back “online”
by Monday. I spent most of this week working on some orders and paperwork.
Copies of the Kingston pre-order customers’ sales orders are going out as I type. The ship dates haven’t been determined yet but I wanted to confirm the sales orders and the sales order numbers so that everyone would have a point of reference.
I had scheduled an appointment with my ENT before I left for Europe two weeks ago just in case I wasn’t 100% when I got back. It turns out that my sinus condition had not completely cleared up before I left. In these circumstances flying actually exacerbates the condition so I am back on antibiotics. I am going to keep working over the weekend but have not been pushing myself too hard so that hopefully I will be back to normal by early next week.
Status: June 15th 2010 - Web site and E-mails
The web site check-out problem has been fixed. Many of you that placed orders last week got a “Status code: -8″ error when you tried to check-out. The problem wasn’t with your card but with the back-end of our web site. Your card was not charged. Most importantly your card information was secure and did not go anywhere (which is why you got the error code).
I arrived back in the office on Monday morning to find a number of puzzling signs that something wasn’t quite right. After several hours of investigation and back and forth with my IT guys it turns out my IT guys screwed-up. We are doing some web site upgrades. During the course of the upgrade the IT guys installed an update that re-set a number of system parameters and forgot to restore those settings before completing the installation. Unfortunately they did not inform me when the update was scheduled to be done and did not give any indication that the update would affect unrelated sections of the site such as the check-out page. I will contact those customers that placed orders during the affected period. I will also cancel out any duplicate orders.
The other casualty of the IT guys’ mistake is e-mails received from June 6th through June 14th. Essentially the IT guys also reset our e-mail accounts. E-mails received during this period have been lost. Once I realized their mistake I was able to re-configure the e-mail accounts last night. All of the e-mails received before June 6th and after the 15th of June are okay as they were configured to be backed-up on an independent server. Had the e-mail accounts been functioning I would have probably seen e-mails alerting me of the problem with the check-out page. It might have been possible for me to detect the problem earlier but I do not normally travel with all of the system’s passwords for security’s sake and choose to avoid public Internet access points when dealing with sensitive areas of our site.
Everything is now back to normal with the site and the back-end systems. I apologize for the inconvenience and confusion caused.
Status June 9th
I finally got back to some e-mails. I will be back at it in the morning. The jet lag is starting to catch up with me so its time to head out for dinner and turn in early.
Status June 8th
I have settled into my hotel in Switzerland. I have good access to the Internet and should be back online tomorrow. I have meeting normally in the morning and into the early afternoon but will be able to get to e-mails in the late afternoon. I will be heading heading back to the US on Friday.