Assembly Speed.

[spaceballs3000]

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php...embly-company/page__view__findpost__p__836733
We have at least 8 people assembling Pandoras ...
Since we are working something between 10 - 12 hours on assembling (maybe even more)...
So if one person is working REALLY slow to build a Pandora, it takes 17 minutes - which would be a bit more than 3 units per hour. ...

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php...rice-increase/page__view__findpost__p__936218
Actually craig said in the other forums that this would go from ~70 to >150 / day.

So ED says they have 8 people that are working 10 hours shifts, and making a minimum of 3 units per hour, that be a minimum 240 units a day.

So why are they only making ~70 units a day now? Is Craig, and ED the only ones making them? Well guess it can't be them, as they seem to spend a lot of their time on their forums. But heck each person can make 30 units a day (as per ED numbers.)

 

[Popcorn Dave]

Craigix said in the official board thread that they only have 3 people assembling at the moment. If you look at the date stamp on ED's post, it's from April last year, back when something was actually happening <_< . They presumably let people go when the boards stopped coming in.

EDIT: Source

 

[spaceballs3000]

Craigix said in the official board thread that they only have 3 people assembling at the moment. If you look at the date stamp on ED's post, it's from April last year, back when something was actually happening <_< . They presumably let people go when the boards stopped coming in.

EDIT: Source

Sounds like bad budgeting planning, if you let people go due to no work, there should have been left over money waiting to re-hire them when work again is needed. Unless it's spent elsewhere during that time, or it never had the full budget in the first place.

 

[naples39]

Craigix said in the official board thread that they only have 3 people assembling at the moment. If you look at the date stamp on ED's post, it's from April last year, back when something was actually happening <_< . They presumably let people go when the boards stopped coming in.

EDIT: Source

Sounds like bad budgeting planning, if you let people go due to no work, there should have been left over money waiting to re-hire them when work again is needed. Unless it's spent elsewhere during that time, or it never had the full budget in the first place.

Or the Pandora team had a razor-thin budget, production delays ate up that budget, and they couldn't afford to pay workers to do nothing for 3 months.

 

[spaceballs3000]

Craigix said in the official board thread that they only have 3 people assembling at the moment. If you look at the date stamp on ED's post, it's from April last year, back when something was actually happening <_< . They presumably let people go when the boards stopped coming in.

EDIT: Source

Sounds like bad budgeting planning, if you let people go due to no work, there should have been left over money waiting to re-hire them when work again is needed. Unless it's spent elsewhere during that time, or it never had the full budget in the first place.

Or the Pandora team had a razor-thin budget, production delays ate up that budget, and they couldn't afford to pay workers to do nothing for 3 months.

Razor-thin or not, the 5 out of 8 people needed to be budgeted as a fix cost for labor, since basic assembly workers are paid by the hour. That 5 people would equal to 2,500 hundreds units out of the 4,000 being built (if there were post to be 8 in total.) That is a non-trivial amount of money they knew they would need to spend on in the future, so 'production delays' cost should not have impacted the fixed cost of the 5 workers.

 

[andyB911]

Quite how you think they would have the budget to have people sitting around doing nothing for 3 months is beyond me.

But you are fully aware of their financial position, so I wonder what on earth you doing here?

Simply a troll?

Or are you paid by Craig?

OPT try their best to alienate this board with the priority access and then you come along and spout the same old balls time and time again and the effect is that it reminds everyone that at heart they are a couple of guys working hard to deliver an innovative product.

 

[spaceballs3000]

Quite how you think they would have the budget to have people sitting around doing nothing for 3 months is beyond me.
...

Not sure if some people in this thread understood me. When then there is no work do be done, one then doesn't normally keep paying your hourly workers. i.e. you let them go. Then later on when you have more work to be done, you again hire them back again at hourly rate.

Thus if one budgets manual labor correctly, they still can get X amount of work done a Y cost, even though there might be gaps in time where no work is done.

 

[andmaz]

Not sure if some people in this thread understood me. When then there is no work do be done, one then doesn't normally keep paying your hourly workers. i.e. you let them go. Then later on when you have more work to be done, you again hire them back again at hourly rate.

Thus if one budgets manual labor correctly, they still can get X amount of work done a Y cost, even though there might be gaps in time where no work is done.

...but to be fair to OPT any delay costs money to sort the issue that has caused the delay and/or they must have weekly costs that are incurred even when nothing is happening.

The longer the project takes the more money it costs to produce the same number of units - hopefully batch 2 will be produced in a few months meaning that the cost per unit is lower than batch 1 - although as we now know the purchase price has to increase to $500 to give OPT the necessary money to continue onto batch 3 and beyond to Pandora 2.

Over 2 years the additional costs incurred each week must be quite significant.

 

[EvilDragon]

The issue were the nubs.

We didn't expect 300 broken boards with nubs last year in April.
Those 6 months with production halt did cause a few refunds - without further preorders to compensate them.

Also, Craig ships internationally, shipping costs are between 30 and 50 USD.
Now think about that: 300 broken Pandoras. You have to pay for the shipment back and forth. This adds quickly up to 30.000 USD.

To not get into any money troubles, Craig decided to only keep 3 workers at the moment.
That lead to PCBs piling up in UK. To get them assembled, he wants to hire more but that needs to be paid - and that's the reason he started selling those piled Pandora PCBs as Express Pandoras.

 

[jonlad1]

Ed, Can I order two replacement nubs?

Are they available to order now?

 

[EvilDragon]

Ed, Can I order two replacement nubs?

Are they available to order now?

No, all of them are currently in Texas for the main production and replacement.
After that, we'll grab a bunch to sell as replacement parts.

 

[gruso]

Simply a troll?

Cha-ching.

 

[renegadechic]

wow, spaceballs still hasn't been banned?

he's a pretty good troll. all the smart ones know to delete the date stamps that make their quotes entirely meaningless.

 

[WoD]

I dare say he makes some sense, but that sense is based on assumptions that have little or no basis in reality.

From what ED said, OpenPandora didn't expect to be scaling back up to 8 workers, from 3, any time soon and thus didn't budget for it.

This is a decision that Craig has stewed on since the sale of those Pandoras on EBay, knowing full well that they could massively speed up production, but trapped by the lack of funds to scale up said production.

I quoth Craig:

I've been thinking about something for the last few days, well, since the recycled units were sold.

We're building away here but as you know it's slow but we're getting there, we can't go much faster as we're very very careful with money and
do things on a budget of next to nothing which is frustrating as I'd love to hire 3* more people and finish these and start batch 2 within a few weeks.

We're talking about a guy who's considering renting rooms in his house to keep this venture running on a day-to-day basis, if the team could have done this without further frustrating pre-order customers, they would have.

Again, I quoth Craig:

So looking at pages on gp32spain and seeing people think we're making millions from this depresses me. We're actually preparing to rent out rooms in our
house to make some extra money.

It's clear that they didn't predict to scale back up from 3 to 8 people until the pre-orders were over and done with. But Craig saw an opportunity, and took it. As much for his sanity as for our benefit, but we really shouldn't criticise such decisions before we take the effort to fully understand them.

 

[porg]

That lead to PCBs piling up in UK. To get them assembled, he wants to hire more but that needs to be paid.

• As the topic manpower comes up: What has happened to the various community offers to voluntarily help out at the assembly site?
• Did the voluntary offers decline? Or is it unrealistic in terms of work organization, as many people checking in/out for only a few days, does not allow an efficient/economic workflow?

 

[moxie]

In order to get some semblance of quality control and consistency, you really need to have the same people there, all the time. If Craig has to train new people every few days, it won't help.