Good day Everybody,
April was an advanced month with the regularly altering Tariff state of affairs. We had some delays on our imports whereas we labored on navigating this however we appear to have issues principally discovered. We shipped 81 machines in April and can proceed to work on ensuring tariffs have a minimal impression on our achievement.
Manufacturing Updates:
81 machines remains to be decrease than we’d like (for a variety of causes) so Ross is engaged on hitting the store ground to assist out extra with meeting and QC for the subsequent few months till we’re capable of catch up.
We wished so as to add one other layer of transparency about fulfillments. We’ve got shipped over 900 machines all time and presently have roughly 700 excellent orders whereas delivery between 80 to 100 models per thirty days. New preorders will doubtless ship in 7 months however delays are all the time doable.
Let’s have a look at some stats:
This graph reveals all machines shipped since 2023. As you possibly can see, issues began off slowly as we labored on creating our processes with half time employees. In December of that yr, we started bringing on full time technicians, which is mirrored within the preliminary spike in shipments. The dips in meeting have been primarily attributable to procurement delays, particularly between batches 1 and a pair of, in addition to a slowdown throughout Chinese language New 12 months this previous February. This highlights the significance of our long run buy orders, which assist guarantee a constant stream of merchandise into our store.
This subsequent graph reveals guarantee repairs by serial quantity, highlighting machines which were despatched again to us for guarantee repairs. This knowledge is essential to monitoring enhancements in construct high quality and high quality management. Whereas some defects are inevitable, it’s nice to see the numerous progress we’ve comprised of the primary 200 machines to the place we are actually. This displays our ongoing efforts to enhance and guarantee a dependable product.
Some would possibly marvel, “Why not simply rent extra folks?” That’s an ideal query, and we now have three fundamental causes for taking a extra measured method.
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Inconsistency: As a substitute of increasing the crew in an inefficient system, we’d fairly first concentrate on bettering our processes. As a brand new enterprise, we’re creating our personal requirements and procedures from the bottom up, tailor-made to our particular wants. This takes time as we determine gaps in our workflow and implement vital enhancements. The identical goes for constructing a constant provide chain with high-quality components.
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Sustainability: Our aim isn’t to rapidly ramp up the crew, fulfill orders as quick as doable, after which face the problem of layoffs when demand ranges off. We’re targeted on sustaining a steadiness the place we persistently fulfill extra orders than we obtain, lowering our lead instances, and setting the stage for sustainable progress and gross sales enlargement.
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Recruitment: Whereas we’ve paused interviews just lately for the explanations talked about above, discovering the proper folks is difficult. We’d like people with a eager eye for each the technical points of the builds and the finer aesthetic particulars. Given the early stage of our startup, we’re nonetheless figuring out new challenges within the store that require drawback fixing abilities and independence – traits which might be troublesome to guage throughout interviews. That’s why we’re cautious about speeding into new hires till we’ve reached our present manufacturing targets.
We’ve utterly overhauled our stock administration course of. The crew carried out an intensive stock audit to evaluate present inventory ranges, and we’ve applied a brand new system to trace stock primarily based on our weekly construct schedule. Prior to now, stock was ordered primarily based on batch measurement, and we’d reorder as inventory ran low. Nonetheless, once we switched suppliers or ordered outdoors of the same old batch cycles, it created inconsistencies in our stock ranges. On prime of that, scrap components and defects made it straightforward to miss orders that ought to have been positioned months prematurely. This led to our store supervisor manually monitoring stock, which was time-consuming and made it troublesome to plan forward successfully.
Now, with our new device in place, we are able to simply replace just a few key numbers every week, permitting us to robotically observe stock ranges throughout all components within the store. The subsequent step can be integrating extra superior software program for much more exact monitoring.
As of now, tariffs mustn’t considerably impression the achievement of our orders.
Design Modifications:
LEDs:
A few of the most fun information out of the previous month is new LEDs. Our unique necessities referred to as for a shorter LED housing to suit across the temperature dial and steam manifold. This compelled the provider to supply a brand new LED bulb that would slot in this smaller package deal. These bulbs are rated to ~80C which is roughly the temperature that the highest plate can rise up to, nearest the boiler. We’ve discovered that the steam LED burns out probably the most which is sensible attributable to its proximity to the most well liked a part of the machine.
After extra dialogue and testing, we’ve discovered a option to match their most popular greater high quality bulb in a barely longer, up to date housing. The LEDs will look the very same however are actually rated to 120C which we count on to actually scale back the variety of failures. That is the most typical half to exit on clients’ machines so we’ll proceed to trace these replacements in hope of an enchancment. A pilot batch of the brand new lights will arrive this week.
Drip Tray V2 Improve:
We lastly have the Drip Tray V2 Improve equipment out there on our website. This can ship instantly whereas provides final. At the moment out of matte black which is in manufacturing once more. https://store.odysseyespresso.com/merchandise/drip-tray-v2-upgrade-kit
That is additionally a good time to order the V2 Lengthy Throw Piston Linkage which permits for greater output pictures in direct mode on Batch 1 machines.
https://store.odysseyespresso.com/merchandise/piston-linkage-v2-0-long-throw
Technical Assist:
William and Wern have been working onerous on extra technical help assets. This button on our web site’s navigation bar will take you to https://assist.odysseyespresso.com/
From right here, now you can seek for a fundamental time period or symptom to seek out a wide range of useful assets, together with images, movies, and detailed explanations. Wern has completed an excellent job documenting the entire commonest troubleshooting points, together with our really useful diagnostic steps and options.
We hope it will function each an academic information and a long run device to assist stop customer support backlogs. We encourage you to discover this new useful resource so the subsequent time you run into a problem you might be able to self diagnose for a faster resolution!
Sincerely,
Ross & William
