Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
I had to read through this several times before I finally saw how you were confused. It was immediately perfectly clear to me that the manual is talking about shipping from a regional. The drayage facility can't arrange for the pickup if it doesn't actually have possession of your crate and the associated paperwork.
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Yes. It probably
should have said something like "
once at a regional, the drayage facility will call FedEx for pickup
from that tegional to the next, to automatically pass the crate on to the next drayage facility."
For some reason, the original sentence as worded implied to our shipping person that they
meant something to the effect of: "
once entered into the system, the drayage facility will call FedEx for pickup
from our home to their drayage company's location." IOW, they're
fetching the crate
to them, because this was a special donation. She assumed that by entering it into the web form,
the system itself was designed to
automatically communicate the data to get the drayage firm involved, and
they would take it from there.
In reality though, the thing that
actually lulled our shipping person into a false sense of security was the fact that we
DID enter a "3:30 pickup" into the form, and got a
CONFIRMATION of it along with our airbills. NOT ONCE did the website issue a warning message that this was ONLY a "scheduled time" and that we
still had to make a
separate call (or yet
another website action) to arrange for the
PHYSICAL pickup by a truck.
The fact that this is a
separate act is what caught us off guard. That's VERY confusing web system design. Now FYI, I've designed interactive forms before. There's absolutely no reason that I can see where once you have designed a web form to
request a pickup time from the user that it should
ever need another action to
initiate that physical pickup. (Silly programmers...)
IMHO, a properly designed web form SHOULD schedule that action
for you within itself (or at least WARN you you need to do more if it
isn't going to act). After all, (one would hope that) it
should be one large, interlocked data management and scheduling system, and not still multiple, independent systems (airbills vs truck operations, etc).
Note that I am NOT faulting the FedEx system per se. I think FedEx is doing us a wonderful service by donating shipping. IMO, it's the combination of the webform and the FIRST manual instructions that left us with a false sense of security. We thought we did everything right, and we were almost out of the contest for it.
IMO, reviewing the shipping doc section might be in order, to make a less ambiguous set of instructions for how to navigate the FedEx system.
Heck... Just adding one "final step" to the docs outlining some INDEPENDENT CONFIRMATION method to verify that everything IS scheduled correctly would probably fix the whole thing.
Thanks.
- Keith McClary
Chief Engineer, Team 1502 "Technical Difficulties"