Posted by Danny on 4/19/2017 to
Shop Updates
I haven't done a blog post in a while, but we've had so much new stuff going on that I wanted to update our customers on some exciting things that have taken place recently to make DOR even better than ever.
The first thing is that in the last month, we've doubled our staff. We have quite a few new faces around here and it's been very exciting for us. Prior to April, Cody was our main phone sales/tech guy, and Nick and I would help back him up as needed. Cody has now moved to the other side of the building and is our CNC operator, which is the first time that we've ever had anybody in that position. I used to do all of the CNC work myself, so having Cody take over those duties has freed me up substantially. Taking his place, we have several new folks - John, Brandon, and Chris. Since we have more help, we've added more phone lines. When you call in, you can press 1 for our customer service desk, which handles order status questions, tracking info, ETA for shipments, and they can process new orders over the phone. If you have technical questions or need tech support, press 2 and it will go to one of our tech guys, which are Nick, Cody, and myself. Chris will also be taking calls on that line once he is more familiar with the products, as he is a mechanical wizard and has 30+ years of experience working on trucks, airplanes, and motorcycles.
As far as emails go, I still answer most of the emails sent to [email protected] If you want to check on an order or need help with an existing order, you can also email our [email protected] address to get prioritized service from our customer service department. That email goes to a different system and we typically answer messages at that address within an hour or less, during business hours. If you aren't sure which email address to send to, just send it to [email protected] and we will redirect it as needed. Any tech questions, pre-sales questions, install issues, or anything other than order status updates or questions about an existing order should go to [email protected]
On the shop side of the building, we've beefed up our staff big time. Not just in numbers but in experience and productivity. I mentioned that Cody is running our CNC table now, so we've gone from cutting 5 or 6 sheets a week, to cutting 10-12 per week. We're getting parts cut much faster than ever before, and we've also added several new guys to help get those parts made after they come off the table. We now have Jordan, Shawn, Ryan, and Nick all on the shop side of the building full time. Nick and Ryan have been here for a couple of years, however Jordan and Shawn are new. Shawn is a rock star in the metal fabrication world, with more experience than anybody else here. He has built some vehicles that are simply mind-blowing, and we added him to our team a couple of weeks ago. Our production rates have gone way up and we are just a few weeks away from having a ton of products in stock 99% of the time. March and April are always two of our busiest months and we've managed to keep up with most orders pretty well, but we should be ahead of the curve in May and be able to put some large numbers of inventory on the shelf. Up until now, when we would have 20 orders of something, we would build 30 and try to keep a small number of everything on hand. It worked pretty well but now our sales have gone up so much that we're just going all out on everything. We expect to have our top 20 products in stock much of the time this summer and beyond.
A growing business does have some downsides, and one of those is that our suppliers have an increasingly harder time keeping up with the builder parts we order. We've had difficulty getting chromoly for our tapered bolts, HRPO for our CNC plasma table to cut parts, and bushings for all of our bushing-ended arms. What we have done is gotten our steel supplier to beef up the inventory they keep on hand for us, and we're also keeping more inventory on hand at our shop. With bushings, we had to go straight to the injection molding facility and have them make our bushings, because the company we ordered them from previously was not able to keep them on hand and decided to just discontinue those products. We are currently waiting on our first shipment of bushings, but we ordered enough to last about six months and our plan is to build several months worth of short arms when the bushings come in. So right now all short arms are listed at 3 to 4 weeks, but they will soon all be listed in stock as soon as the polyurethane bushings get here.
Once we get caught up and have most products on the shelf, we're finally going to get back to work on our V10 truck, Power Wagon, 24 valve, and the V10 buggy. So you can expect to see some really cool builds getting wrapped up in the near future, and out on the trail being abused.
All of our contact info is on the Contact page, but feel free to give us a call at 855-9009-DOR (9367) Monday through Friday and get to know some of our awesome new guys we've added recently!