Today I woke in Toronto to frantic calls from Amazon India...

Today I woke up in Toronto, Canada to frantic calls and messages from Amazon India on my Whatsapp.

I had been in a work trance (what I like to call my cocoon where I limit physical proximity and contact with my phone) the last couple of days and concentrating on several projects at the same time as I am normally prone to do - my EMBA classes, working on SmarterAngel.com's v0.18, designing parts for several of my robot projects (BeardedMaker on Instagram) - and went to sleep in the early hours of the morning.

An hour before I usually wake up is when my phone started to go off with text messages and calls on Whatsapp linked to my Indian phone number. This is not a normal occurrence ever since I've been in Canada (September 2021), as most of my important contacts reach out to me on the canadian number instead. Fully expecting some spam or scam, I begrudgingly picked up my phone to see it was Amazon employees. And no, it was not their delivery personnel calling to tell me there was a shipment for delivery to my home in India.

Amazon India's R&D team has been a customer of RoboRium (which I own) for close to 2 years now. Over this period of time, obviously, their account is one of those that we take special care of, and some of the members in their R&D team have my direct contact instead of having to reach out through the normal channels in times of emergency. Getting frantic calls like that from 3 people from their team would mean either something went wrong with the products from the last shipment or they need something urgently. So I jumped out of bed and swung into action. Called one of the people back and asked what was going on and then I found out it had nothing to do with RoboRium.

Turns out since we've been on a bit of a hiatus fixing our post-pandemic operations for RoboRium India while setting up RoboRium Canada at the same time, their team decided to order a product directly from the manufacturer based in another country, and it has gotten stuck somewhere on the way to their office. We at RoboRium, have spent nearly a decade perfecting our supply chain in a way that among hundreds of orders, delays happen maybe handful of times in a year, whether it be in manufacturing delays, ordering products from manufacturers, travel time, clearance process at the import/export customs, quality check, or delivery to customer. And we have our costs figured out to a ± INR 10 (~USD 0.15) range even if things go wrong and extra costs are incurred. This is one of the reasons that in nearly a decade of operations we have had zero product returns.

In the past, some of our customers have tried to do the same thing that Amazon did but have always faced hurdles that either increased their overall costs, customs clearance time, or ultimately ran into product quality issues. Even though we encourage our customers to try other options if they think its better for them, we have always seen them return to us to ensure their costs and product quality remain fixed.

So while I had to wake up earlier than usual and spend around 2 hours guiding Amazon employees on what to do to get their shipment delivered safe and sound (and hopefully it'll work even though it may cost them a bit more than expected), remember, its best to leave it to us. Currently, we are in a limbo and not accepting orders as products are being moved from our warehouse in India to Canada, but by the end of this year, operations of RoboRium in India should resume back to normal, and those in Canada should be replicated in a similar fashion to ensure high standards across the board, so pretty soon no one else will have to suffer the same problem.

Now if only I can figure out just how to get a full 8-hour sleep.