Delivering furniture - it's complicated you know

If Baumhaus were the BBC, both yesterday and today would be classified as 'quiet news days'. You can always spot them at the BBC because they generally feature the rescue of a random animal from a given predicament, e.g. deer from river, dog from drain, horse's leg from fence, cat from fire, and so on.


Today, I am going to cunningly disguise the fact that I have been working from home (on the new sofa designs, which does vindicate me a little!) by trying to make 'delivering furniture' sound interesting.

Baumhaus van loading / dispatch area

Actually, you know what? I actually do find planning deliveries quite interesting (and so does Becks our Logistics Manager), because it is a lot more complicated than it looks.

This is the way it works:

1. Our lovely customers (YOU!) place an order on our website

2. A report gets sent to Becks telling her what has been sold and where in the country it is being delivered

3. She looks at where all the vans are going and allocates space on the van to the item that has just sold

4. Once a van is 'Full' with sold items and confirmed deliveries, she presses a button and the printer goes 'whiirrrrrrrrrrr' and prints out a label for each of the deliveries on the vans.

5. Juan picks up all the labels, curses at Becky (because he was expecting a 'quiet news day') and then goes round the warehouse with his barcode gun, picking all the bits of furniture that need to be loaded onto the vans.

6. The 'Despatch Controller' (i.e. the bloke / gal with the clipboard in the picture above) will determine which vehicle is loaded first, and what order the furniture goes in on (the furniture being delivered last needs to be loaded first of course).

I know you are reading this and thinking 'that is well easy!', but trust me, when you are 'cubing' (filling) a delivery van to the max, it can be quite challenging.

Oh, I forgot, soon I shall be posting details of Beck's new van. It is a 3.5 ton Luton with a tail-lift and she is well happy with it, coming out with all kind of 'northernisms'.