Sometimes a little bit of public humiliation is required.
Most, if not all of organizations purchasing Dell Servers in the past 3 months have been stunned by incredible delays in production. We have seen on average 4-5 weeks from purchase time to delivery.
Within the realm of economic uncertainty delays in production are understandable. Dell has long maintained a successful model of keeping the right amount of inventory on hand. Particularly for agile organizations such as ours, who buy a range of server and storage products depending on client and contract demand. What is not acceptable is a failure to resolve their own vendor relationships.
Here comes Ceva Logistics. Seemingly Dell’s preferred (perhaps only) freight carrier of choice. When we have orders exceeding a certain weight they will be transported via Ceva (formerly Eagle).
We generally need our equipment within a few days time frame so we always tack on Next Business Day shipping. Here are our last two experiences:
In November we placed an order for 10 PowerEdge R610 servers. 21 days later, a result of production delays, our servers were out for delivery. Based on our correspondence with Dell, these servers were ready for pickup from Ceva on the Friday morning in question. Next Business Day had been paid for, in turn we expected these servers the following Monday. Ceva’s tracking logistics indicated the same.
Monday arrived, the servers were not delivered. Explanation being that Ceva had picked the servers up from Dell past their 6:00PM cutoff time (6:30PM), and therefore did not consider Monday to be Next Business Day. Fine, we asked if we could go to their warehouse and pick them up ourselves. Not possible they said, the servers were not in Portland, they were still in Austin.
Ok fine. We expected our servers the following day (Tuesday). 3:00PM passed and no servers had arrived. We called Ceva to find that they had no intention of delivering the servers that day. Their notes indicated they only had one pallet of the shipment and were waiting on the second. “If it is OK we will deliver them tomorrow (Wednesday),” the Ceva representative told me. Absolutely impatient beyond belief I told them no and asked them to deliver what they had. After an hour of investigation, the Ceva representative helping us determined that even though one pallet was present and their systems indicated half of the order ready, ALL of the servers were on that pallet and sitting in Portland. It was 4:30PM, they were willing to ship them but it would be later that evening. 6:30PM arrived and so did our servers, in an unmarked van to the side of our Datacenter. It was pouring down rain. We unloaded the servers with the help of the driver, who then (we can only assume) wasn’t fond of the rain and considered it too wet to help us get them to the door and up the elevator — we handled it ourselves.
Dell ended up refunding our large Next Business Day shipping payment with extended apologies for the moronic display of customer service by Ceva.
Production delays continued (and continue) to plague us throughout December and January. On January 8th we placed an order for 60TB of storage units, we were given a shorter lead time of 17 days. Storage units not being on a significant delay cycle, they were out for delivery on the 19th, to be delivered on the 20th (today).
When we arrived to our datacenter, operation managers informed us that they were concerned with the shipment Ceva delivered. The side of the boxes were WET and the Ceva delivery person acknowledged this.
We unpacked two of the units and found water condensation on the chassis itself:
Water had seeped through the first two boxes and managed to get onto one of the units.
If any Sun or HP Vars are reading this, feel free to give us a call. We’re still waiting for Dell customer service to respond to our reps expedited request for assistance.
For a service provider, delay costs are tremendous. Each day we cannot deploy is a day of lost revenue. Now we add servers that are arriving with water on them, and we have a recipe for vendor change.
Perhaps this is specific to Ceva logistics in Portland, however we’ve been down this road before with their prior usage of DHL. I never wrote about that experience, but the end result was Dell dropping DHL as a carrier.
Sometimes it takes a little bit of public humiliation and customer venting to get a problem solved.
Hopefully someone will pick this up and give us a hand.
-Thomas
This entry was posted on January 21, 2010, 1:47 am and is filed under Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
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Ceva Logistics and Dell Delays
Sometimes a little bit of public humiliation is required.
Most, if not all of organizations purchasing Dell Servers in the past 3 months have been stunned by incredible delays in production. We have seen on average 4-5 weeks from purchase time to delivery.
Within the realm of economic uncertainty delays in production are understandable. Dell has long maintained a successful model of keeping the right amount of inventory on hand. Particularly for agile organizations such as ours, who buy a range of server and storage products depending on client and contract demand. What is not acceptable is a failure to resolve their own vendor relationships.
Here comes Ceva Logistics. Seemingly Dell’s preferred (perhaps only) freight carrier of choice. When we have orders exceeding a certain weight they will be transported via Ceva (formerly Eagle).
We generally need our equipment within a few days time frame so we always tack on Next Business Day shipping. Here are our last two experiences:
In November we placed an order for 10 PowerEdge R610 servers. 21 days later, a result of production delays, our servers were out for delivery. Based on our correspondence with Dell, these servers were ready for pickup from Ceva on the Friday morning in question. Next Business Day had been paid for, in turn we expected these servers the following Monday. Ceva’s tracking logistics indicated the same.
Monday arrived, the servers were not delivered. Explanation being that Ceva had picked the servers up from Dell past their 6:00PM cutoff time (6:30PM), and therefore did not consider Monday to be Next Business Day. Fine, we asked if we could go to their warehouse and pick them up ourselves. Not possible they said, the servers were not in Portland, they were still in Austin.
Ok fine. We expected our servers the following day (Tuesday). 3:00PM passed and no servers had arrived. We called Ceva to find that they had no intention of delivering the servers that day. Their notes indicated they only had one pallet of the shipment and were waiting on the second. “If it is OK we will deliver them tomorrow (Wednesday),” the Ceva representative told me. Absolutely impatient beyond belief I told them no and asked them to deliver what they had. After an hour of investigation, the Ceva representative helping us determined that even though one pallet was present and their systems indicated half of the order ready, ALL of the servers were on that pallet and sitting in Portland. It was 4:30PM, they were willing to ship them but it would be later that evening. 6:30PM arrived and so did our servers, in an unmarked van to the side of our Datacenter. It was pouring down rain. We unloaded the servers with the help of the driver, who then (we can only assume) wasn’t fond of the rain and considered it too wet to help us get them to the door and up the elevator — we handled it ourselves.
Dell ended up refunding our large Next Business Day shipping payment with extended apologies for the moronic display of customer service by Ceva.
Production delays continued (and continue) to plague us throughout December and January. On January 8th we placed an order for 60TB of storage units, we were given a shorter lead time of 17 days. Storage units not being on a significant delay cycle, they were out for delivery on the 19th, to be delivered on the 20th (today).
When we arrived to our datacenter, operation managers informed us that they were concerned with the shipment Ceva delivered. The side of the boxes were WET and the Ceva delivery person acknowledged this.
We unpacked two of the units and found water condensation on the chassis itself:
Water had seeped through the first two boxes and managed to get onto one of the units.
If any Sun or HP Vars are reading this, feel free to give us a call. We’re still waiting for Dell customer service to respond to our reps expedited request for assistance.
For a service provider, delay costs are tremendous. Each day we cannot deploy is a day of lost revenue. Now we add servers that are arriving with water on them, and we have a recipe for vendor change.
Perhaps this is specific to Ceva logistics in Portland, however we’ve been down this road before with their prior usage of DHL. I never wrote about that experience, but the end result was Dell dropping DHL as a carrier.
Sometimes it takes a little bit of public humiliation and customer venting to get a problem solved.
Hopefully someone will pick this up and give us a hand.
-Thomas
This entry was posted on January 21, 2010, 1:47 am and is filed under Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.