How laptop delivery breaks

This page explains current issues that are known, or believed to be, the major causes of XO Laptop non-delivery.

For an explanation of how laptop delivery was hypothetically supposed to work, see How laptop delivery works.

This page is NOT necessarily complete or 100% accurate. Support-gang volunteers are working to keep it up to date, clean it up, and verify what's here for accuracy, but the information here is *not* yet 100% settled. Keep this in mind as you read.

Please make sure your edits conform to the topic of this page: the current laptop delivery systems, how it may go awry, and the general responses of Give One Get One donors to these problems. Venting, discussion of individual circumstances, or instructions to OLPC or its contractors all belong in the community forums or in other Wiki pages

NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page.

Potential causes of shipping delays and "lost" orders

1. The initial shipping address was a PO Box. Brightstar's contract with FedEx doesn't allow shipping to PO Boxes. When it was first discovered that Paypal orders could have PO Boxes as their shipping addresses, and that many Give One Get One donors had used these, the response was that staffers at Patriot (very busy answering customer service calls already) should call or email the affected donors to get a non-PO-Box address. Needless to say, many of these donors were never contacted, and those who were may not have had their corrected addresses updated successfully in the Brightstar shipping database (see numbers (3) and (4) below).

The second, and apparently current, solution was for Brightstar to open a special account with UPS, which will be able deliver to PO Boxes, which may resolve the problem for donors affected by this issue.

2. The shipping address contained more than one address line. An severe bug in the fulfillment software (of unknown origin, but likely in code at Patriot) caused many Give One Get One donors who paid via Paypal and other indirect means to have their shipping addresses truncated in the customer service and shipping databases. This happened if the street address had more than one line - as, for example, anyone who tried to ship to their work address "care of" their company's name. This apparently affected a huge number of donor's orders.

For example, a hypothetical G1G1 Donor "Nick" might have had his normal work address transmitted from Paypal to Patriot as:

Nick Blancoputty
c/o Laptops Aren't Us, Inc
1234 Scrod Lane
Boston, MA 10506

But in the Patriot database, and therefore in the actual database that Brightstar is attempting to ship from, it would have been recorded only as:

Nick Blancoputty
c/o Laptops Aren't Us, Inc
Boston, MA 10506

...which obviously is not a valid shipping address. The problem can also manifest in other ways, more subtle. For example, an original address like:

Maria Lee Jetson
4567 Pixel Place
Building 4, Apartment 123C
Chicago, IL 60609

...would have been recorded as simply::

Maria Lee Jetson
4567 Pixel Place
Chicago, IL 60609

While this last address likely will pass validation as "shippable", it's missing vital information (building, apartment, or suite number; or corporate mail stop number). This may cause the package to be lost, or rejected, as the simple street address alone could reference be a high rise apartment or office building with hundreds of tenants.

Donors affected by this issue have little recourse other than to contact Patriot to attempt to get a shippable address in the system. There have been reports that this process has been successful for some, but not for the majority, of those in this category. (See (5) below.)

3. Customer service (Patriot) and/or the shipper's (Brighstar's) databases are confirmed by OLPC insiders to have internal integrity issues, such that order changes - such as corrected shipping addresses - may be overwritten and therefore lost by subsequent updates or syncronization activities. (The database is reportedly Microsoft SQL Server, but would be controlled and populated with custom programming by Patriot and Brightstar).

Many donors affected by issues (1) and (2) above have called or written customer service at Patriot numerous times and , but the original (wrong) address is still apparently in the database despite these contacts. Patriot staffers have insisted they are following correct procedures to update the order information; if this is true, then it may be the fault of the custom programming or the way the database is managed. For example, an operational or programming procedure that would cause partial or complete overwriting of records in one database (e.g., Patriot's) with older or simply different information from the other database (e.g., Brightstar's) would explain these observations and continuing issues.

Donors affected by this issue may have no recourse but to keep contacting Patriot by phone (reportedly more effective than email, which may or may not be acknowledged or processed by them) in the hope that one of the changes will eventually "take" and the order will be sent to shipping.

4. Address changes and corrections taken by customer service (Patriot) may not have been received or processed by shipping (Brightstar). OLPC's customer service contractor, PatriotLLC, and their shipping contractor, Brightstar Inc, reportedly do not share a common database or have access to a common order fulfillment system, as would be the industry norm. Order changes, such as corrections to shipping addresses, taken by Patriot have been reported by some to be provided to Brightstar by the sending of single email messages, one email per change. There are obviously a large number of places such a system could fail and the corrected address not be processed by Brightstar, similarly to section (4) above.

Donors affected by this issue may have no recourse but to keep contacting Patriot by phone (reportedly more effective than email, which is rarely answered or acknowledged by them) in the hope that one of the changes will eventually "take".

5. FedEx might not have been able to deliver to the address given. If the laptop is returned by FedEx as "unable to deliver" or under an RMA (Return Material Authorization - a defective unit replacement request), it is shipped directly to Brightstar. Unfortunately, Brightstar doesn't have any email addresses or the ability to send out messages to donor base. Notifications about the shipment or return have to go back to Patriot, hopefully to get sent out to the donor in question. This takes a long time, and there are a number of bottlenecks and detours in the information flow where the information could get lost along the way.

6. There have been reports that the FedEx-supplied address-verification system being used by Brightstar and/or Patriot (1) is much too sensitive to small, ultimately inconsequential variations in addresses, (2) has a high "false-negative" rate (i.e., flagging an address as unshippable when it's actually fine), and (3) is only intended by FedEx to be used as a tool for address correction, not as a bright-line test for whether an address can truly be shipped to by FedEx or not. The use of this system for other than its originally intended purpose could conceivably be explained by Brightstar's unfamiliarity and relative inexperience with delivery of products directly to single end-user addresses via common carrier, rather than to large distribution facililities.

Donors affected by this issue may be able to resolve their problems by specifying an alternate shipping address that the verification tool approves of, even if it's not their preferred shipping address.

Dedicated phone line for resolution of address issues only

OLPC and Patriot are reportedy, "in the process of setting up a 24 hour dedicated phone line for donors". The purpose of this dedicated number is apparently limited only to address-failure issues. Email messages recently received by donor still awaiting their XO laptops have indicated that: "the number is 1-800-883-8102 and it will be operational as of Tuesday, 1/22/2008. Live agents will not be able to assist you until that time." Donors are also invited to email their shipping information to service@laptopgiving.org [1] if they prefer.

The same email message also includes an offer for a partial refund (the $199+shipping "Get One" portion of their donation) if the donor prefers this over continuing to wait for the shipment of their XO.

Critcism of OLPC by Donors Due to Order Fulfillment and Shipping Problems

There has been much comment online concerning the above order fulfillment problems, especially among the donors whose shipments were or still are affected by them. It is commonly held that a majority of issues were "self-inflicted" by the OLPC Foundation and especially, by its order fulfillment contractors. Many donors believe these problems were foreseeable, easily preventable, or at the least could have been corrected many weeks earlier in the shipment process.

Given that a reported 10%, or about 17,000, of US donors' shipments are in "problem" status (data as of 1/19/2008), the magnitude of the systems failure is so great that OLPC's claims to not have known order fulfillment problems existed until very recently is understandably difficult for many donors to fathom. This has added fuel to the (already extensive) online commentary among donors that OLPC has been oblivious to the problems in general: too slow to recognize that they even existed, too trusting of their third-party order-fulfillment contractors (i.e., Patriot and Brightstar) to deal with them properly, and ultimately, unwilling to exert oversight and pressure on these same contractors to resolve the issues. Some have speculated that internal politics have played a role in creating this situation, as these same contractors are also members of the OLPC Board.

Because of inconsistent or absent communication by OLPC concerning order fulfillment issues, and responses seen as failing to acknowledge problems or "blaming the victim", many unshipped-to donors currently perceive OLPC as being aloof, uncaring, and defensive. Many have also said they would be greatly more patient with the absence of their laptop if the organization had been truthful and forthcoming in its responses and willing to take responsibility for the mistakes it and its contractors had made. Finally, some have questioned whether the ability of the organization to carry out its primary mission - the shipment of millions laptops to children in developing countries - needs to be reexamined in light of the logistical issues as seen in the much-smaller North American G1G1 program.

Compounding these perceptions were numerous missteps by Patriot LLC in their design and implementation of their customer service infrastructure. One example of this would be Patriot's installation of a touchtone phone call routing system that was not tested and did not actually accept any touchtones for over a week after it was announced and publicized. Another would be the "track your shipment" page, which only functions (if at all) 'after' the donor's order has been shipped - which does not help the 10% of donors with "stuck" orders. Finally, the need for donors to contact Patriot numerous times to repeat the same information (such as corrected shipping addresses) also added to their frustrations. (For an example list of some of these issues as discussed at length by affected donors, many weeks before first acknowledged by OLPC, visit community forums such as this.)

That such fundamental failures and missteps, such as not being able to correctly handle an order with a two-line address:

• existed in a modern order-fulfillment system in the first place;
• were not corrected by Patriot or OLPC after they were found (e.g., by going back to the source Paypal confirmation data to retrieve the missing address fields from the orders);
• have never been officially acknowledged by Patriot, Brightstar, or OLPC, or were blamed on the donors themselves (e.g., by claiming all address issues were caused by the use of PO Boxes);

and that donors who were affected by the problems:

• were rarely contacted proactively to explain and correct the issues with their orders (leaving many wondering and waiting, with no idea anything was wrong), and
• that due to a severe lack of systems and database coordination between Patriot and Brightstar, many found it impossible to correct their addresses even after repeated calls and emails to customer service representatives

...have all been great sources of frustration for a large number of Give One Get One donors who are still without their XOs, despite having donated very early in the program.