Santa’s Sleigh is not quite fast enough

This is an example how the holiday season disappointed customers

Last year was a terrible Christmas for many families in the United States. The majority of those families were those that put off their online holiday shopping until the last minute. UPS and FedEx were the two companies that were in the spotlight last year with an estimated 2 million late packages that did not get delivered on time for Christmas. This was due to both bad weather and the lack of planning and preparation these companies had to perform.

The holiday shopping season in 2013 was a record breaking one with more customers than ever shopping online with Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart to name a few. However, the shipping companies were not the only ones to blame for the disastrous holiday shipping dilemma. Many of the large online retailers were offering customers expedited shipping and/or guaranteed delivery without actually paying the additional fees to the shipping company for that service. For example, if you ordered a product online and the company promised to deliver in two days that doesn’t necessarily mean that the company paid UPS or FedEx to get the package there by those specific days. Retailers were not expecting to pack and ship the amount of orders they did nor were they expecting bad weather around the country or UPS and FedEx to not have the ability to support the large number of packages going through the system. All of these were issues that lead into packages not being delivered on time.

For the upcoming holiday shopping season in 2015 retailers and logistics companies are altering their plans for the massive amount of expected purchases. Shipped goods are expected to rise as much as 11 percent when compared to last year. So you may ask, what are they doing different from last year to support this growing industry of online shopping? More and more of the big box retailers with online and brick-and-mortar stores and also some of the smaller ones are offering more and more options to place your order online and then pick it up in store a short time later. They are also preparing to ship some orders from store locations instead of from a central warehouse, which could significantly decrease transit time.

UPS and FedEx are hiring about 10 percent more seasonal workers than last year to help process, sort and deliver packages. They are also investing enormous amount of money to more efficiently run their operations such as automated sorting.

With these adjustments in place the online stores and shipping companies are supposed to be a lot more effective at delivering packages on time than they were last year.

If you had a position of authority in one of the big box online retailers such as Amazon, Target or Wal-Mart, how would you improve operations?

 

Sources:

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2014/10/26/fedex-ups-plan-holidays/17975401/

http://kctv.images.worldnow.com/images/24306338_BG1.jpg

http://www.dispatch.com/content/graphics/2013/11/27/holiday-shipping-art-ga1pqp1u-1holiday-shipping-jpg.jpg

Companies are wanting to automate sorting such as this

 

Product Management Pitfalls

The first activity we did as a class was the paper puppet project. This was done as a fun way to introduce us to Project Management. The main point was to show the class how a basic supply chain worked and how to identify a bottleneck. Additionally, as a class, we learned the importance of product quality and communication. We also touched on the idea of crashing when talking about the complexity of the second task. Throughout this demonstration I kept thinking about how it was similar to a project I worked on this summer.

I started an internship a few weeks after school ended at a mobile second hand ticket broker called Ticket Scalpr (which is like a mobile stubhub).  My six coworkers and I were tasked with creating stadium guides for all the NFL and NCAAF Big Conference teams, 120 in total. Each guide included a few paragraphs of stadium history, fan pictures, videos, restaurants, and a top ten best features list for each stadium. The end result would be a website new where visiting fans could find enough information about the venue to enjoy each game like a local.  Even though team member had their assigned stadiums, communication was key. When one of us found a good source of information or pictures, it would get shared so that everyone start adding content as quickly as possible, working together to knock out the bottleneck task of finding pictures and video as quickly as possible.  We also talked about quality.  With no real quality control until a final review; we had to judge for ourselves what to use.

The project manager used many of the concepts we learned about in class. He would often ask us how long we thought it would take each one of us to complete a task so he could estimate the earliest completion time. Once the project manager identified our bottleneck he took it upon himself to crash the project for us.  He shortened the project duration by a few weeks through outsourcing the gathering of pictures and video to another contractor.  We liked this because finding the pictures and video was one of the more tedious factors of developing the guides.  Overall the project took much longer than anticipated based on the quality they wished to present on the website.  Thus, the initial goal of moving on to social media by mid July was missed, we finished all the stadium guides by the end of summer with a high degree of quality.

Right now the website has yet to launch.  I’m not sure what else needs to be added or changed to get everything ready to go, but the project has already taken longer to complete than anticipated.   The only change I could really see to make this project go smoother would be to add manpower and possibly create a information sharing library to enable the reuse of content.

 

What else would you recommend to management to speed up the project?

www.ticketscalpr.com

World Cup 2014: A good or bad idea for Brazil?

Brasil-2014-Brazil-2014-Logo-Oficial

The 2014 World Cup will be hosted by Brazil and faces heavy criticism in regards to event logistics and preparation. The risks associated with hosting this event are great, especially given Brazil’s fragile economic, social and political situations.  Stadium construction has experienced delays, there have been numerous funding questions raised even after the project was well under way and safety issues for visitors have become more prominent as a result of protests and violence in Brazil. All these issues surrounding the event leads me to ask the question: why are these issues being addressed now as opposed to when the project was in its conception stage? Is the fact that Brazil is the most successful soccer nation in the world enough of a reason to ignore all the logistical shortcomings the country faces?

The political, social and economic climate of Brazil has not changed much since Brazil was awarded the rights to host the event back in 2006. Given all the issues surrounding Brazil’s candidacy, why was a such a great risk taken by FIFA? Why not award the event to more infra-structurally solid country so as ti minimize risk? For example, Brazil boasts no public transportation system and an entirely new transit system needs to be conceived in order to accommodate the influx of fans. What if the system is not completed on time? What if it not capable of meeting demand? World Cups in recent times have been hosted by countries (Italy in 1990, USA in 1994, France in 1998, South Korea/Japan in 2002 and Germany in 2006) who have reliable existing systems in place: major stadiums to host matches, solid transportation systems and relatively stronger economies to deal with project funding .  On paper the worthiness of Brazil hosting the event is fair. Realistically, a project like this poses major risks as the prospects for problems arising is great, especially with  the level of uncertainty  facing Brazil internally.

South Africa in 2010 was a unique situation as it was both a economically/socially developing country as well as a soccer developing country. Though awarding the tournament to South Africa had good intentions and was successful, the post-tournament fallout was great. South Africa’s debt was large and many of the stadiums were completely dismantled/significantly downgraded. Further, the spike in economic activity local businesses realized subsided and the impact the tournament had on promoting and developing soccer in the country was lackluster. I would think most projects of this stature would consider the long-term as an essential component of its risk assessment plan, especially given the amount of time and money spent coupled with the country’s internal problems. Since soccer is huge in Brazil,  developing the game there is not a  purpose of the event like it was in previously in South Africa, Korea/Japan and the United States.  I would argue the benefits of hosting the World Cup did not outweigh the costs as the long-term effects of the project were ignored.  In turn, Brazil could face many of the same struggles next summer.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/06/12/can-brazil-really-handle-the-2014-fifa-world-cup/2/