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.
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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
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 first response was that staffers at Patriot (who already didn't have enough time/people to answer the calls they were getting) 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 (5) 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 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 Patriot shipping database. 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 could 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 known and confirmed 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 as "unable to deliver" or is part of an RMA (Return Material Authorization - a replacement request), it goes 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 and speculation 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.
Critcism of OLPC by Donors Due to Order Fulfillment and Shipping Problems
There has been much comment online concerning the above problems, especially among the donors whose shipments were or still are affected by them - especially given that many of the issues are seen as "self-inflicted" by The OLPC Foundation and its contractors - easily preventable, or at the least recognized and corrected much sooner in the process. Many donors have perceived OLPC as being aloof, uncaring, defensive, and inconsistent in their communications concerning the reported order fulfillment problems, and much too slow to recognize the need for, and move towards, tangible resolutions to them.
Compounding these feelings were numerous missteps by Patriot LLC in their customer service infrastructure - for example, setting up a touch-tone phone routing system that was not tested and did not actually accept any customer touch-tones for over a week after it was announced and publicized. The need for donors to contact Patriot numerous times to repeat the same information (for example, a corrected shipping address), adding to the donor's frustrations. (For an example list of some of these issues, visit community forums such as this.)
That such fundamental issues, such as not being able to correctly handle 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 ordered and paid very early in the program.
Suggestions to fix the problem
Action is needed by OLPC to create a modern customer service architecture, both with business process and technology, and enforce its usage by all partners, and developers, regardless of their role in the project.
Access should be possible to all partners based on their role in the ordering or customer support process. OLPC must set standards in this area because it's their brand that is at stake.
Details are best discussed on another page (customer service standards), but a centralized customer database which OLPC forces their partners to use sounds like the only real solution to this problem.
