[Tomker]

I decided to make this post because as an international team we have to face all sorts of added difficulties, and for the past 2 years we find ourselves going out of schedule because we have to wait an excessive amount of time for VexPro products to be delivered.

VexPro orders that were made by Israeli teams during week 1 of the build season had just arrived yesterday to the FIRST Israel offices – 3 weeks after they were done!
After emailing them yesterday to try and see if something could be done to fix this situation for future orders, we got some unclear answer saying things about 10 day transit times and needing a 2 week lead time on international orders. In addition, we were told that we could use other order methods such as ordering directly from their site – as all Israeli teams, we are forced to make our Vex and Andymark orders using an alternative system through the FIRST Israel website – to save us both money and time on orders. To our knowledge, the possibility of allowing Israeli teams to order directly from vex was brought up and denied by Vex themselves. Finally, we were told that we should try to plan and figure out parts for our robot ahead of time and give them as much lead time as possible to process the orders, the main problem is that with the current system – we have to manually submit our order through the FIRST Israel website and then, each Thursday, our regional director has to manually send all Israeli orders in one combined document – which by itself makes place for tons of possible mistakes. With that in mind I don’t see how we can affect the amount of lead time given to them in any way, and I don’t see how we can finish planning our robot early enough to make an order that will allow us to stay on schedule.
Not trying to say they don’t do their best to shorten the delivery times as much as possible, but somehow Andymark orders are almost always being delivered to us under similar circumstances in under a week.

Vex owes nothing to us or any other team and we are obviously not forced to use their products, but the VexPro products are of great quality, really diverse and most importantly - relatively cheap (which is essential to us because we have to pay nearly 150% on all orders because of international delivery and customs), and we find them to be the best solution for most parts of our robots.
We don’t want to give up on using those products, and believe that a solution could be found to improve our experience with ordering through Vex and shorten the delivery times.

In the meantime we made another VexPro order this past Thursday, because we planned and CADed our robot with their products, believing those problems will be fixed for this season. We couldn't afford to spend any more time changing our robot so we had to make this order, and are really hoping that it won't set us back by too much time.

Us and all Israeli teams would really appreciate it if someone from Vex who sees this post will find a way to fix the problem, or at least accelerate the most recent orders – because we believe these mid-season orders are the most important and most packed ones for all teams, and right now all our local teams are in some sort of a stall until further notice…