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 any 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
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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Potential causes of shipping delays and "lost" orders
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.
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.)
Internal Patriot/Brightstar database errors may cause updates to be lost
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.
Order changes may be lost between the fulfillment contractors
Changes and corrections to orders 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".
FedEx delivery may have failed without the donor being aware of this
If the laptop is returned by FedEx as "unable to deliver" (for any reason, which may or may not have to do with the shipping address), or it is being returned under an RMA (Return Material Authorization - a defective unit replacement request), it is shipped directly to the Brightstar warehouse. Unfortunately, Brightstar reportedly doesn't have any donor email addresses, nor the ability to send out messages to one or all donors. Notifications about the returned shipment must go back to Patriot, hopefully then being 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.
The FedEx address verification tool may incorrectly indicate an address is unshippable
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 customer service phone for resolution of address issues
OLPC and Patriot are have sent some donors email messages on Friday, 19 January 2008 saying "We are 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 correction of address-failure issues. [OLPC verification needed] The number given is 800-883-8102 and OLPC says it will be operational as of Tuesday, 22 January 2008. 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 await shipment of their XO.
Criticism of OLPC by Donors Due to Order Fulfillment and Shipping Problems
Criticism of OLPC
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 8500, 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 those same 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.
Criticism of third-party contractors
Compounding these perceptions were numerous missteps by Patriot LLC - the order processing, fulfillment, and service contractor - in their design and implementation of their support and communications infrastructure. One example of this were the "confirmation" emails sent to many early donors in early December, which did not include the internal order number from the Patriot system. This left donors in this group that had "lost" or "stuck" orders with no viable means to track them or reference them to Patriot's customer service representatives.
Other examples include 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, or their "track your shipment" web page, which only returned useful information after the donor's order had shipped, and otherwise returned "invalid reference number:. This of course which did not assist the donors that had "stuck" orders which were not considered shippable by Patriot's database.
Finally, donors who found it necessary to contact Patriot numerous times to repeat the same information (such as corrected shipping addresses), and the inconsistent responses by Patriot customer service representatives as to the source of the shipping problems added greatly to their frustrations. (An example list of some of these issues as discussed at length by affected donors, many weeks before first acknowledged by OLPC, can be found on community forums such as this.)
Effects on donors' perception of OLPC and its mission
Numerous donors affected by the order fulfillment problems have complained in online forums concerning them, and the OLPC's handling of same. The general perception is that such fundamental failures and missteps, such as not being able to correctly handle an order with a two-line address:
- should not existed in a modern order-fulfillment system in the first place;
- should have been automatically corrected by Patriot or OLPC much more quickly after they were found (e.g., by going back to the source Paypal confirmation data to retrieve the missing address fields from the orders);
- if not correctable, should have been proactively reported to each affected donor immediately;
- should not have been blamed on the donors themselves (e.g., by claiming all address issues were caused by the use of PO Boxes);
- should not have required repeated calls and emails to customer service representatives to correct problems and to receive accurate order status; and
- should have been quickly and officially acknowledged by OLPC, Patriot, and Brightstar.
Because of the problems and a perceived near-total lack of communication by OLPC (as donors were rarely contacted to explain and correct the issues with their orders), many were left wondering and waiting, with no idea anything was wrong with their order except that their XO laptop had not yet arrived. In fact, the lack of accurate, timely, and transparent information from OLPC is often cited as the greatest source of frustration for the affected donors - many of whom where the greatest proponents of the OLPC's mission and goals, and were among the first to donated in the G1G1 program.
In the end, a number of donors have questioned whether the ability of the OLPC 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 failures seen in the much-smaller North American distribution program.