Still waiting for delivery date?

Sam Evans wrote:

 

If anyone can give me a logical, sensible reason why a supplier needs to be contacted repeatedly over the supply of a non-urgent product that will not be charged for until it is shipped, I will be very surprised.

Sam, you're evidently happy with a non-interactive ordering service.  And that is totally fine, for you.

However, not everyone is you.  Others have higher expectations, and some people have actual deadlines, as Roger explained.  For me, I have the high expectations of good quality service to which I have become accustomed from Farnell.  Nothing less than online account self-management and order tracking is satisfactory.

Morgaine.

Sam Evans wrote:

 

I am honestly amazed at some of the reactions on here to delays/lack of information about shipping. We have all ordered a completely new device that was only released to manufacture a few months ago and which has received orders probably well in excess of 100,000 units. How surprising would it be to find that the supply chain struggles to keep pace with demand and also has problems keeping people informed. We all surely know that the PI is a low-profit article for two major component suppliers to be selling, and that they each have a massive commercial operation to run selling their main lines of product.

Then there is us, the people that didn't even get a automatic confirmation e-mail. The only way we can find out what the hell is going on is by contacting customer support.

I have absolutely no complaints with Farnell. I have been kept in the loop over it by them from the word go and it has never been an item for me that I wanted – or needed the next following day.

Moment of truth for me.

Newark/Element14- Canada Order date Mar 21

I was intially just shown as status: back ordered then I was shown as status: back-ordered with an expected ship date of 19 June. A month or so ago, that date was changed to 28 June.

Some time today, the status was changed to "Received (currently being processed)" with the expected ship date unchanged at 28 June.

It's 8 pm on 28 June here .....

I'm in same boat. Ordered in March. Status of order is "Received". Expected ship date of June 28. After all the promises and missed commitments, I have pretty much given up on ever receiving my order. The way this has been handled is terrible and not professional..  Anyways, if I ever get the RP, I guess I will be happy.... Someday.....

I'm certain that Element 14's community reps here are 100% aware of the communication shambles.  What we can't know though is whether they have been able to make this known to the people with the authority to improve the situation.

I've contracted to companies who have rooms full of low-paid customer-facing staff, and those employees typically feel very powerless.  Reacting to a visible problem and making waves to encourage change (or even passing on bad news) is considered detrimental to employment prospects.  Even when the official company policy is more liberal than this, sometimes their immediate supervisor is close-minded and gives the helpful support person a black mark for making his job more complicated.  The real world is a bit messy like that.

Once again, I'll say that I see only one way out of this situation:  make Raspberry Pi boards available ex-stock, FAST.  It's the only good way of overcoming the many support woes that come with pre-ordering and waiting.  I'm a bit worried that the production rate falls short of "fast", by some considerable margin.

Morgaine.

Another way out of this situation is to be honest that the current hardware

is essentially beta hardware, and the current software is beta software,

and the user's guide has yet to be published.  Most manufacturers put a

cap on the number of beta units distributed.  The typical goal is to have

enough beta units to smoke out the important flaws, but not so many as to

overwhelm the ability to provide good customer support or to make a

bad first impression on a large segment of the market.

coder27 wrote:

 

Another way out of this situation is to be honest that the current hardware

is essentially beta hardware.

RPF is in denial that the current Model B board needs a redesign to be of production quality, as far as we can tell from their public (lack of) comments.  As long as it remains that way, Farnell and RS have their hands tied about what they can say without creating a PR disaster.

Every engineer knows that there is no engineering progress possible if faults are not acknowledged.  Unfortunately RPF seems to be much more in tune with the PR process than the engineering process.

Farnell did a good job of recognizing that Fedora14 needed to be pulled,

so there is some hope they are on top of things.  I suspect that Pete Lomas

does not have much time available for pcb redesign, based both on his

disappearance from this forum, and based on his linked-in profile which shows

that as of May 2012 he has taken on the job of "director of engineering"

for Norcott, which perhaps requires more of his time.

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/petelomasnorcott

So the RPF focus on PR may be somewhat out of necessity for lack

of engineering resources; that's my speculation anyway.

Edited to add:

It made sense for Pete and/or Norcott to invest engineering design effort

for the beta boards and the production boards, with the expectation that

they would recover this investment during the production phase.  But after

the beta production run was truncated, and the mass production was moved

to China, I suspect this investment no longer made sense.

There was some talk of perhaps having Norcott manufacture Model A boards,

but that doesn't seem to be happening either. 

This is exactly what happened to me but my order date was with Newark USA and on March 19th. I just checked hoping my order status would say processing but now the estimated ship date was changed from June 28th to July 5th. I have never received an email regarding these changes. The only way is for me to keep checking with Newark on my order history. Not complaining just reacting to all these emails. I'm patient enough but wish they could communicate better.