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Update on Van's Kit Production and Delivery Dec 2021

This was true in 1975. In 2022 it is complete nonsense.

In fact, Van's has done this with parts orders for years.

There are 2 issues you run into. One is the manpower overhead of producing that data in a customer facing format. While that has gone down since 1975 there is either a manpower investment up front to automate that kind of thing or a smaller ongoing manpower investment to do that process manually.

If I had to guess the second issue is probably the bigger one. When using this kind of data in house its understood that ship dates and product on hand are estimates. However when releasing that to the public too many people treat it like gospel and then raise a stink when something gets pushed. In my line of work its a client relations nightmare when our vendor publishes that they are delivering product on a 3 month delay but then has a push and we have to tell the client is now 6 months out. They show us a tweet by the vendor and call us liars.

Just my 2 cents but it becomes very difficult to manage client sat at that point.
 
Personally I would like to see a daily posting of the type and number of kits that shipped. Customers deserve transparency in what is shipping, not vagaries about material lead times, labor shortages and process improvement.

Disclosing this kind of information publicly is probably not in the best interest of Van’s aircraft (or it’s customers) because it just might provide too much proprietary business information to their competitors.

Skylor
 
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