It's Sunday morning and this is a nice sight:

Loaded trucks ready to roll (6 photo panorama stitched together - the original photo is huge)

A week ago at noon on Saturday we completed harvest.  After the 30 minute lunch break, we started to pull orders to load trucks.  And yes it was a scramble in the office to complete prorates, print pull sheets and get the first line up to the shipping yard in such a short time.

Due to the weather challenges, we started loading trucks 10 days later than our goal of December 29th.  All our promised ship dates are predicated upon starting on time.  Needless to say, we were late and not making happy customers (except those who had their own weather problems).

Trucks being loaded late Saturday afternoon

How do you make up 10 days? Realistically, you can't.  But we came close.  What you see here is the last of the 1st and 2nd week promised shipments and a big start of the 3rd week shipments.  With the trucks we will load tomorrow (Monday), we will have delivered or on the road all the early shipments plus shipping the rest of the orders on time.  In other words, we shipped two weeks worth of products in 8 days!

It is Sunday - a day of rest (at least for all but a few of us).  Next Sunday I plan to be back in church too in my normal place running the PowerPoint for the services.  The field/shipping workers finally have a day off - a well earned rest after several weeks of continuous labor - late into each night.  All the trucks were loaded by Saturday night.  Payroll costs took a hit making it happen.  Overtime and double overtime to get it caught up.  We truly take our commitment to our customers seriously and are grateful most of our customers understood the challenge.  Yep - you noticed it - not everyone was understanding.  Sigh.

I am truly grateful for our employees and the efforts they put forth for their company.

Others in our industry marvel how we can average up to 240 orders shipped a day.  Some say it is not possible.  It is.  We do it every year.  In a future post, I'll show a little of how it is done and more importantly how we do it accurately.  More to come.

Ron Ludekens 1-16-2011