Can Contingency Plans Deliver?

Back in the long-forgotten days of the Millennium Bug, the DeliveryDemon was involved in a fair bit of contingency planning, basically identifying and documenting the actions which would be needed if a range of adverse occurrences came to pass. Even twenty years ago most large public bodies had pretty detailed contingency plans to draw on and adapt to suit the risks specific to the Millennium hype and scares.

 
Twenty years have passed and the concept of contingency planning is fairly mainstream. Mainstream means routine. Routine means a chore. Routine chores don’t get the same analytical thinking as do novel concepts. They get written, signed off, then put on a shelf and forgotten. It’s not clear to the DeliveryDemon if this has happened to public sector contingency plans. Having a Prime Minister making a maudlin announcement like a B-movie actor, – ‘Loved ones will die’ – does not engender confidence. If the contingency planning material exists, there should be facts to announce, even if those facts are only decision points. Instead we have constant statements which are quickly contradicted. And our irresponsible media love it – headlines galore, each scary enough to be clickbait.

 
What would the DeliveryDemon expect to see?

 
Obviously the NHS ought to have fairly hefty and well maintained plans, since they call on them every winter. Whether they have the resources is another matter, and not one which can be addressed quickly enough.

 
Logistics, as at the Millennium, is another key area. The UK, with its old and twisted road system is not an easy place to plan logistics. That is partially offset by the traffic reduction which has started already as people reduce their social contact. But a whole range of other factors come into play. Food and related goods have to come from somewhere and they are part of the infrastructure a country needs in order to function. That means a lot of HGVs going up and down motorways and through towns and trading estates.  But successive governments have abdicated responsibility for this and left it to ‘The Market’ – the range of competing companies which form the food supply chain – to manage the logistics of getting food to customers. It does not work. Retailers forever look for ways to cut costs, JIT (just in time) supply is the norm, there is cost in reducing expensive shop space to create more storage space. The retail model has little contingency in it and that drives the need for supply logistics.

 

Panic buying and hoarding are human nature, and totally distort the demand side of the equation. ‘The Market’ quite simply cannot control that, not without some sensible support from those who are supposed to be managing the country. Yes, the DeliveryDemon is talking about rationing, but not in the way it was applied during the World Wars of the twentieth century. So far, we are told that there is sufficient food in the supply chain and the problem is the speed with which is leaving the supermarket shelves. That’s a pretty clearly defined problem to solve.

 
Of course it’s not the only problem. Much of the UK’s food comes from abroad and the agriculture and fishing sectors haven’t figured high on government priorities for decades. Dr Tim Leunig, economic adviser to Chancellor Rishi Sunak, is understood to have said the food sector was “not critically important” to the country’s economy – and that agriculture and fisheries “certainly isn’t”. That’s looking like very bad advice now.

 
Already scarce items are appearing on Amazon – 16 rolls of Andrex for £49.99 anyone? Mothers relying on formula milk can no longer find it in the supermarket and the advice circulating is that it can be obtained from pharmacies but only on prescription – further demand on GPs and on NHS finances.

 
Of course, logistics needs people – to move, load, unload, deliver the goods. Two problems here. Those people are as prone as the rest of us to Covid-19 infections. And it’s in the nature of the job that they have contact with other people as well as the goods they deliver. The Army is well supplied with logistics expertise but it is certainly not an infinite resource and there will be a whole range of calls on its manpower.

 
Disruption of utilities and hygiene services has yet to be given much prominence. Households need power, water, sewage, more so when social isolation advice causes people to spend more time than usual at home. Hospital needs are even greater. As is the case for logistics, all these services depend on people, and people can get sick. So can their families and that means healthy people having to drop out.

 

One utility which has become much more critical in the last 20 years is communications. Today the internet is an integral part of most people’s lives. It’s a good way to disseminate news – and false news. It allows people to work easily from home. Social media enables people to keep in touch during periods of physical isolation. It’s also a channel for mass hysteria. That makes it important for the powers to be to have a trustworthy and informative presence through reliable media sources. That’s just not happening.

 

And underlying the need for good communications is a whole range of other functions. Telecomms companies provide the delivery mechanism – in this country still reliant on ancient copper wire technology for the critical last mile to houses. Internet service providers enable individuals to have internet access. Security companies provide all manner of protection for data, financial functions and the like. Banks use the internet to let people and companies manage their money. Online retailers abound – a great benefit to those confined to home. Email and social media create a venue for communication without the need for face to face contact. Content providers are a major source of entertainment when public gatherings in cinemas and at live events no longer happen.

 
In a well-run democracy, the government would have at its fingertips the management status of all these critical functions. Well-established plans would already have been activated to smooth over the most obvious disruptions. Serious consideration would already be given to the actions of other countries in the global economy, and the impact these actions have on this country. There is no sign that this is happening. All we’re getting is bombast and hyperbole and contradiction and obfuscation.

 
The DeliveryDemon has a message for our senior politicians. Think. Plan. Forget the vanity projects of a fortnight ago. Deal in facts, not spin. Drop the B-movie Churchillian speeches. Do the job. It’s hard? Tough shit, you could have thought it through when you went for the job. JFDI!!

Delivering Poor Customer Service – Sony and 4ourhouse.co.uk

All the DeliverDemon needed was a replacement battery for a perfectly good laptop that has been around for a couple of years. Previous experience with Sony meant it was no surprise to discover that Sony discontinue supply of their model-specific batteries long before the average lifespan of the laptop has expired. The Sony callcentre gave the DeliveryDemon the number of their accessory supplier 4ourhouse.co.uk as a supplier of the required battery model. The DeliveryDemon does NOT recommend this outfit. Why?

1. The wrong battery turned up
2. The price which had been quoted was not the price for the battery required – the correct battery, needless to say, was more expensive than the quoted price
3. They cannot just send out the correct item, the customer has to pay for a new item and go through a time consuming process in order to get a refund on the incorrect item
4. The promised email details for a return did not arrive
5. The callcentre system loses incoming calls
6. 4ourhouse had incorrectly recorded the DeliveryDemon’s email address – a particularly stupid mistake as the email address uses the same name as was correctly entered on the delivery address
7. The callcentre cannot change an incorrect email address
8. The supervisor gave a time of up to 24 HOURS to get an email out through their automated system.

That is one hell of a lot of mistakes and stupidities to pick up on one single, simple order. And of course every facet of this error allows 4ourhouse to use their own mistake to hold on to the customer’s money. In the meantime the customer, instead of having the convenience of online purchasing, has to waste time taking the incorrect item to the Post Office and obtaining proof of posting.

This is a stunning example of practices which give a bad name to online retailing. The DeliveryDemon will NOT be wasting any more time buying via 4ourhouse.co.uk In fact, the DeliveryDemon, after several years of using Sony equipment is seriously considering changing to a manufacturer with a more ethical and effective spares supply chain.

The DeliveryDemon Is Blogging Again – and thinking about the Supply Chain

The DeliveryDemon has been thinking abut delivery and technology. One of the benefits of technology is its ability to dematerialise goods and deliver them electronically. For music and videos and software that’s great. Where it falls down is when there’s a need for physical delivery. Interestingly, that puts at risk the delivery of the bits and pieces of hardware we need to exploit all this technology. We can use technology to place our orders, then it all comes down to sending stuff through the physical supply chain.

Two things happen once our goods get into the supply chain – they become unimportant and they become attractive.

• The unimportance of our parcels

From the factory production line to the doorstep our parcel is just one of millions being thumped, bumped and dumped. No-one really cares about it. If it gets lost or damaged, it’s the sender’s problem, or the intended recipient’s problem, or an insurance company’s problem. Even at source, the supplier doesn’t care, it’s just another item off the production line. So goods get lost and damaged and no-one is answerable. There’s a cost to remedying the problem, of course, and inevitable the cost finds its way back to the end consumer.

• The attractiveness of our goods

Many electronic gadgets and components are small, so easily lost, and just as easily fitted into pockets. Packaging, even if it doesn’t show explicit sender details, is often easily identifiable as containing some sort of technology. The value of such items can be high.

The DeliveryDemon has been told of many examples recently of people buying technology, only to have it beaten to a pulp on its way to its destination.

• A card for a camera never arrived. The supplier came up with conflicting excuses, with one person claiming it was lost in the post while another claimed it should have been in the envelope with its companion which did arrive, but that it had not been packed.
• A laptop arrived in a seriously battered box.
• A mobile phone arrived in a sturdy plastic envelope which had been ripped open. An attempt had been made to slit the box inside, to remove items without breaking the seal on the box.

Of course, the costs of all this is being passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices, insurance premiums, and credit card charges.

Some suppliers are fighting back, attempting to make their packaging bash-proof. The DeliveryDemon knows a supplier of personalised beers who has taken it as a personal challenge to ensure that the full complement of bottles arrives undamaged – not a technology issue but the principles are the same. The packaging battle has its own cost, and not just the cost of producing and applying it. The more robust the packaging, the more likely it is to be persistent, and usually voluminous. Most often it will end up in landfill, perhaps via the complex recycling arrangements imposed by many local authorities.

Some companies offer tagging and tracking of goods in transit. For high volumes, manual checkin systems are likely to be error prone, even if with electronic detection of tags. For example, even if a box or jiffybag is tagged, that’s no guarantee that it still contains all its original contents. The cost of tagging individual components would be prohibitive, and would create electronic waste.

It’s often said that the main components of a solution are people, process and technology. From the DeliveryDemon’s observations, the money is going into technology (including packaging technology), the protagonists are hiding behind the theory of how the process should happen, but not nearly enough effort is going into delivering the people aspects of the supply chain. For many jobs in the supply chain, temptation can be high while rewards are low, and in a high transaction volume environment the effect of this is easily predictable. Yet it’s the aspect of e-commerce that no-one is getting to grips with.