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Conid Delivery Time


mvosyka

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People, don't forget that the CONID manufacturer/company is a small sideline of a otherwise occupied business/company....producing pens is not the mainstay of those....

 

Don't worry, people won't forget when it is literally being mentioned in almost every page of this thread

Edited by penzel_washinkton
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Don't worry, people won't forget when it is literally being mentioned in almost every page of this thread

 

I don't worry , but people will forget.

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I don't worry , but people will forget.

 

Smartphone Attention Deficit Disorder?

Add lightness and simplicate.

 

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Solution 1: Increase price to reduce demand.

If demand stays high, price then allows -

Solution 2: hire/provide additional production.

Solution 3: Troublemaker ink method. Stop letting people order until you can keep up with your promises. Only open orders for a set time a few times a year. (This is also how a couple of safety razor manufacturers operate. They have a sign up lottery method)

Solution 4: Instead of promising 90 days, or 180, say 270 or 1 year. This should have the same effect as solution 1.

 

If you aren't making enough profit to hire additional workers to keep up with production, your fees are too low.

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Long-term solutions? They don't seem to have the ability to adapt quickly. I have known companies where demand rises and the company can't react fast enough or unwilling. They are out of business. This is a recipe for disaster. No matter how good a product is. They must meet their deadlines or they will pay long-term. Personal, I waited until I found one used and had it within a week. However, they do not come up often.

 

I would expect more extended delays with the Holidays coming up.

You gotta chill man. They're trying to figure out how to increase production while keeping the same quality control. If they don't have the right solution right now, thinking about it is a better idea than investing time in the wrong direction.

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Solution 1: Increase price to reduce demand.

If demand stays high, price then allows -

Solution 2: hire/provide additional production.

Solution 3: Troublemaker ink method. Stop letting people order until you can keep up with your promises. Only open orders for a set time a few times a year. (This is also how a couple of safety razor manufacturers operate. They have a sign up lottery method)

Solution 4: Instead of promising 90 days, or 180, say 270 or 1 year. This should have the same effect as solution 1.

 

If you aren't making enough profit to hire additional workers to keep up with production, your fees are too low.

 

https://www.conidpen.com/pause-to-restart/

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Two things. One, I wrote that before the link was posted. I just found that I never hit 'submit'. Two, they didn't say that they were actually going to fix the problem. Bluntly, they just said "This will let us catch up." Just from the time this thread has existed, they would have had enough time to establish what they were going to do when they caught up - people are more willing to wait when they know there will be a real solution in place. Otherwise, it'll be reopening for orders in 2020, and ... within three months, they'll be backlogged again.

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Two things. One, I wrote that before the link was posted. I just found that I never hit 'submit'. Two, they didn't say that they were actually going to fix the problem. Bluntly, they just said "This will let us catch up." Just from the time this thread has existed, they would have had enough time to establish what they were going to do when they caught up - people are more willing to wait when they know there will be a real solution in place. Otherwise, it'll be reopening for orders in 2020, and ... within three months, they'll be backlogged again.

 

They clearly state that they are employing more staff, and finetuning their workflows and adding further automation. That sounds like an attempt to address the underlying issues to me...

Vintage. Cursive italic. Iron gall.

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They clearly state that they are employing more staff, and finetuning their workflows and adding further automation. That sounds like an attempt to address the underlying issues to me...

Call me a cynic, but hiring a receptionist and shuffling people around in the workshop is what it sounds like. I have a distinct dislike of marketing-speak such as they used. It's used when people really aren't certain about what they're doing, but they have to try to placate others.

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Two things. One, I wrote that before the link was posted. I just found that I never hit 'submit'. Two, they didn't say that they were actually going to fix the problem. Bluntly, they just said "This will let us catch up." Just from the time this thread has existed, they would have had enough time to establish what they were going to do when they caught up - people are more willing to wait when they know there will be a real solution in place. Otherwise, it'll be reopening for orders in 2020, and ... within three months, they'll be backlogged again.

I don't particularly care when you wrote that. You clearly have it out for Conid for some particular reason.

 

You don't seem to have worked in manufacturing. Just from reading it they are going from a on order basis to a batch production with a fair bit more automation than they have now. Toss in a couple of new people, rearranging the workflow, which literally can mean the physical flow from one machine to the next and this looks positive. They are learning and looking to improve, not that you will ever give them credit for that the way you have been jumping them for every little thing.

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Call me a cynic, but hiring a receptionist and shuffling people around in the workshop is what it sounds like. I have a distinct dislike of marketing-speak such as they used. It's used when people really aren't certain about what they're doing, but they have to try to placate others.

Not cynical, ignorant is a much better term there. They may not know where precisely the processes will end up, but they know they have to make changes to production and have a time limit to get it sorted. You must dislike almost everything, Conid hasn't said anything different from most other companies and in some ways is giving specific information most companies would never divulge.

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I'm self employed. i deal with manufacturing, fabrication, shipping, and U.S. Customs issues on a daily basis. Those people who call me 'ignorant' and that I "have it out for Conid" don't know anything about me - and obviously nothing about Conid or other small manufacturing companies.

 

What I've read here says that Conid has had this problem for a VERY long time - and they haven't been interested in really fixing it. Either that, or they've had someone who hasn't been doing their job, and they're playing "let's cover up for that".

 

When a customer calls, having pre-paid for a fabrication, and says "Hey, I want an updated delivery date.", they get one. If you don't have the information immediately, you say "I'll have to talk to John, and find out exactly where this job stands."

 

You don't ignore emails, refuse to answer telephones AND have a nine week late delivery. That's horrible business. They could have asked one of their kids or wives to send boilerplate responses, if they couldn't afford to hire a receptionist. My guess is that they never actually assigned someone to answer emails, and that they all carry cellular phones, so ignored their main business line. A classic SEP (Someone Else's Problem)

 

Real example. I was at a sign company last week. They had their employees working on large project, but they had stopped for the day and were cleaning up. A known customer stopped in who needed a sign _fast_. As it was a quick job, the owner just directed one of the employees to cut out the letters, and another to cut out the sign shape right there. Fifteen minutes later, she was out the door - very grateful - and the employees headed out right afterwards. If this was, for example, Conid, they'd have had the door locked and people would have pretended to not be there.

 

In this particular bit of weasel wording, here's what Conid said.

 

  • Maintain the quality and care for the open orders without any single compromise
  • Strengthen our customer service by expanding our team to allow the necessary dedication for a constant and swift follow up
  • Production of parts with perfected balance between batch size and efficiency to ensure stock and eliminate problematic shortages
  • Finetune workflows and the further automation of underlying processes to gain time

 

"Maintain the quality and care for the open orders.." - "Don't worry, we'll get there, and your pens will be good." Fine.

 

"Strengthen our customer service by expanding our team" - their _customer service_. Key word there. Manufacturing is NOT customer service. They said they would add people to do what they should have done months ago. (or longer, if what I've read here is accurate). Answering emails and the phone. They've said nothing about adding anything to manufacturing.

 

"Production of parts"... Very much weasel worded, but implies that part of their problem is that they've not been keeping enough parts on-hand to satisfy demand. This could be cash flow, it could be like some businesses around me, where someone _not on site_ decided that keeping X supplies on hand is plenty, even if they regularly run out halfway to the next delivery. I'm sure everyone has seen this if they frequent convenience stores to get a fountain drink - it's the most common 'We've run out and our delivery isn't until Tuesday' that I run across. (and a restaurants). It's amazing how the owners of those businesses refuse to restock mid-week. It's hard to say which could be the issue here. As they have 253 pens to build right now, and are _very_ far behind, they either manufacture every part on-site, or do very small batch orders, which -their- suppliers take their time making.

 

"Finetune workflows and the further automation of underlying processes". This is "We don't want to hire people to get the job done, so we're trying to figure out how to shuffle people around and if we can offload work elsewhere" weasel speak. There's nothing magical about building a fountain pen - Pen_Ingeneer and his web site list pretty much everything. So there's no reason they couldn't say "We're going to add another person to address our bottleneck in linishing." - other than they _haven't figured out what to do yet_.

 

As for Conid as a brand? I've never used one of their pens. Everything I've read here says they make good pens. They're just not showing that they're very good at business. If they were making runs of non-bespoke pens for stores, I'd say that they did the bulkfillers as a way to keep people busy between production runs. Their web site, however, makes it appear that they customise everything.

 

The key to keeping customers when you've made mistakes is to be as straightforward and open about the mistakes as possible. Telling people that you're "Working forward to maximize potentialities in the presentation of fine writing instruments while minimizing gaps in the workflow production process." isn't straightforward or open. Maybe it's that my uncle has make a very good living as a motivational speaker as well as assisting businesses in fixing customer relations issues (They even fly him around the world to give seminars for BP), but every business sense I have is screaming what comes out of the south end of a northbound ox. I don't believe they really know what to do.

 

They've halted ordering, and frankly, that's the best thing to do right this minute. If they'd stopped right there, and said "We've stopped taking new orders while we assess the best way to both improve our production and customer response time.", I'd be much more sanguine about them. That's an honest answer, without saying "We don't really know what to do." Instead, they added several lines that, frankly, use words without saying anything.

 

What we (or rather, those who've ordered from Conid) will have to do is wait and see what they do. If they start issuing newsletter or web updates each week, giving at least a _little_ information on what they're trying to do, then that's a positive sign. If they go dark for the next six to nine weeks, without feedback - that's a bad sign.

 

Realistically, it should take less than three days to decide what to do - and they could tell everyone what they're doing without harming trade secrets. "We're hiring three more machinists and two receptionists." Businesses do that all the time, as it makes their customers feel good that the business they are buying from is expanding. If they were a multi-million dollar company, with hundreds of employees, then a couple of weeks might be necessary to make a decision. Bespoke pen companies, unfortunately, aren't multi-million dollar businesses. Bic would hate it if FP's were popular enough again to make that a reality.

 

Heck, I don't even know for certain how much they charge for the pens. I've found one demonstrator for 615 euros at Penworld.eu, but I don't know if that's close to what they sell them for on their own site. Frankly, I'd have left the pricing intact so people could plan ahead. If it's 600 euros for a pen, that would be a fair profit on 15 man hours, being paid 20 euros per hour. (after taxes) Does it take 15 hours of production to make the pen? I don't know. I don't expect Conid to say that. That WOULD be proprietary.

 

Really - before throwing insults because you think someone is attacking one of your pet companies, think about it. I'd love to see them prosper, and their turnaround go to a reasonable time frame while responding within a day to customer requests. I just don't know that they're going to make it. We'll all have to see.

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Bibliophage, you are entitled to read Conid's communication as cynically as you like, that doesn't make you right.

 

Based on the fact that Komec have been trading since 1982, are a successful precision engineering business, and have developed an innovative spin off business on the side, I am inclined to take their words at face value. I have no doubt that they have the experience necessary to make Conid a sustainable business. Werner didn't build Komec on "weasle speak", and I see no evidence that he is trying to do that here.

Vintage. Cursive italic. Iron gall.

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Bibliophage, you're making a lot of assumptions with incomplete information, and implying a lot of things from a fairly simple message. I think that's where people were saying you had something against the company. I'm also assuming you are from the US, and you aren't understanding that business operation and work environments are different in the US and Europe. In the sign example you gave for instance, you mention that its good business. Well, it's good for the customer, and it's good for the owner, but it's not really good for the workers who had to stop their cleanup unfinished (after already putting in a full day), work on another project, and then presumably finish their cleanup (including redoing anything that they had previously finished that was disrupted by the additional work). I don't know if that attitude of everything for the customers and owners is quite the same attitude that people in Europe have. Also as for not having parts on hand, they probably don't want to fall into the same trap that many small businesses have of expanding too fast, and then ending up with a lot of sunk costs in parts/inventory/equipment that's not needed when demand tails off.

 

From my end, I've still been able to get email replies and haven't ever had the huge delays that one person mentioned here (and I've been in contact with them for the last month or so about a minor potential issue with one of the Conids I have). That said I do think that they could likely improve their communication overall. And as for the manufacturing delays, I know when I get extra money I'll be hoping to pick up more Conid pens, and I hope that whatever changes they make they don't sacrifice the quality that I've come to enjoy.

Edited by Joe124013
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Bibliophage, you're making a lot of assumptions with incomplete information, and implying a lot of things from a fairly simple message. I think that's where people were saying you had something against the company. I'm also assuming you are from the US, and you aren't understanding that business operation and work environments are different in the US and Europe. In the sign example you gave for instance, you mention that its good business. Well, it's good for the customer, and it's good for the owner, but it's not really good for the workers who had to stop their cleanup unfinished (after already putting in a full day), work on another project, and then presumably finish their cleanup (including redoing anything that they had previously finished that was disrupted by the additional work). I don't know if that attitude of everything for the customers and owners is quite the same attitude that people in Europe have. Also as for not having parts on hand, they probably don't want to fall into the same trap that many small businesses have of expanding too fast, and then ending up with a lot of sunk costs in parts/inventory/equipment that's not needed when demand tails off.

 

From my end, I've still been able to get email replies and haven't ever had the huge delays that one person mentioned here (and I've been in contact with them for the last month or so about a minor potential issue with one of the Conids I have). That said I do think that they could likely improve their communication overall. And as for the manufacturing delays, I know when I get extra money I'll be hoping to pick up more Conid pens, and I hope that whatever changes they make they don't sacrifice the quality that I've come to enjoy.

For the sign company - as I said, they were doing cleanup. They'd come back from their main installation job, and were just putting things away. Because the work they were doing was not critical, the owner of the company had a choice of letting them finish, and having a long term customer go away disappointed, or having them stop the non-essential task they were doing, take care of the customer, and have a customer happy. He chose having the shop stay messy until the next day over telling the customer to go away. The workers weren't affected either way. They didn't have to stay longer, or suffer from 'lack-o-pay'. It's just the most recent example I've seen, but not the only one.

 

I'm glad you've had good response time. From what I've read, you were in the minority _of people I've seen responding in this and other threads_. The OP apparently tried to contact them repeatedly over a very long period of time, using multiple methods. If that's common in the EU, I'm sorry for you.

 

For parts and supplies? I understand trying not to be overstretched - but for them to be constantly weeks behind in production, there's a bottleneck that someone just kept ignoring, for whatever reason. "This is just a short term bubble. We shouldn't invest in what we won't be able to use." That's fine, but after a year of constantly being behind, it's not a short term _enough_ bubble.

 

As for silverlifter - you've just made my point for me. From what you just said, this is a spin-off business of Komec-Helsen (Belgium?) That means that there's a very good chance that it was put together to try to take advantage of an opportunity, using existing personnel and supplies (and dead machine time). In 25 years of being in IT, I've seen innumerable customers create spin-off businesses. Some have succeeded, most have not. Many of them didn't succeed because they weren't actually treated as totally separate entities that needed their own resources (especially in personnel) and tried to operate using people from the main business - who were focused on the primary business that paid their wages. You can't operate like that for very long; it is too much stress on personnel, equipment, and location. The most successful spin-off (which has now grown to outnumber the original owners in personnel) that I've worked with and helped set up was fully funded with totally separate equipment, personnel, and location, and the creating company simply kept an eye on the books. They even made sure that when they used that secondary business, they treated it like a totally separate company, and didn't try to give themselves huge discounts, etc. That company ended up being completely spun off on its own. (It was created so that the owners had a supplier set up exactly the way they needed it to be. It turned out that what they needed was also what others needed as well, so it worked out well. They then divested the company because they didn't want to get overly distracted once it was running properly.)

 

Certainly don't claim that "Conid" has been around since 1982 - unless they started it at the beginning. That's referred to as a "Lie". The domain was registered in 2009, so at best, it's a 10 year old company. It could be they bought the domain long before they started real production of pens - I don't know, as I spend more time paying attention to technical companies. (According to archive.org, they had a single shockwave flash animation in 2009, and didn't get away from that until 2013. Reading through it, that appears to be when they were starting to get serious about customisation. I can't tell; I may have to use an older machine to try to view the earliest Flash versions. (This is an excellent example of why you don't use 100% dynamic content for your web sites.)

 

Without looking at the books, and getting real information from the corporate owners, (Correct me if I'm wrong, but 'nv' is LLP or LLC, I think) it's impossible to say. I can understand them not wanting to say "We overestimated what we could do with our existing resources.", but that's EXACTLY what they should say to keep customer confidence. Transparency.

 

Anyway - as I said in the previous post, we'll just have to see what comes up in their downtime. If they spend the time to make sure to keep people informed as to their progress, that will be the most positive sign. If they stay dark until they reopen orders - that'll show an intention to not really change.

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Komec dates to 1982, not Conid.

 

And no, we continue to disagree :) My point is that neither of us can see into the future, but on the balance of available evidence*, I would bet on success.

 

*And, to be clear, there is zero evidence to support your claims of bad faith.

Vintage. Cursive italic. Iron gall.

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I'm thankful for this thread; learned lots from posts on experiences on how to run a business, manufacturing and suggestions for how to work with customer expectations.

 

I am speculating that this feedback and cancelled orders has/had impact whether they monitor or by passthrough via @Fountainbel

 

When I placed my open order, I knew of the backlog and Conid was surprised I requested a delayed date into 2020. Even their robo boilerplate email updates were comical :lol: as this team of "engineers" clearly are in need of better administration side to the business. I do appreciate the engineered effort though, amidst a busy schedule.

 

But I trust Conid for the quality they put out, not for their marketing or comms. Others clearly differ and need more reassurance or shout out about the injustice. Thank you for being the squeaky wheel :D

 

I have another in-stock backorder from another well known quality vendor from July that is just being delivered now (4 months delay). Stuff happens; JoWo had a delay which delayed them. I did not think to stir up a social media mob or call the authorities.

 

Age has taught me that somethings are not worth getting too worked up about; life is just too short!

 

I'm glad to hear Conid has finally paused on orders "to create the greatly needed peace and time to complete the long awaited open orders" and will be "maintaining the same quality and individual care "

  • 253 Bulkfillers / 6 people = 42 pens per person in 6 months
  • or 253 in 6 months = 1.3 pen(s) / day 24/7 without breaks

What other small pen manufacturer makes a unique well engineered bespoke pen at this pace and known quality?

 

I hope it is still Conid, as I have skin in the game. As @Bibliophage says, "We'll all have to see."

 

And if I don't get my pen by X date and in pristine unblemished condition, ink splattering tantrums will be thrown.

 

Didja hear that Conid! :lol:

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I have sympathy for everyone, sort of. We have a very successful product and occasionally we get good press and what used to be a two day turn around to fill an order can slip into 5 without even noticing it. Last Christmas, we got way behind, almost 7 days and it sounds great to have all that new business but we had to pay rush shipping to make the goods arrive as promised. But in addition to the delay and all hands on deck, suddenly we have a wave of customer service calls to deal with, making things worse and worse. It's a tough one.

For me, the delays happen but it's the lack of communication that's inexcusable. Despite all their problems, there's still some good will for Conid. They should use this to their advantage. Silence is going to be the death of things. It would be easy enough to export all the emails into a spreadsheet, enter those into a program and send a mass mailing explaining the understand that there's a problem and they appreciate their customers' patience. That would take maybe half an hour.

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