Order Fulfillment
When we started Balun Designs in 2006 we never envisioned the order volume we are currently experiencing. As many of you know, we are a bit unique in that ALL of our units are hand built to order. Because of this and the combined technical /manual skills required to build a unit correctly, increasing production volume is not as easy as just adding staff. Quality units take time and skill to build correctly and adding staff requires an increase in just about everything including pricing.
At the same time we are also constrained by the total number of units we can produce in any given time frame. This constraint combined with our build to order structure is something the current hosting services cannot accommodate. So we are forced to use their in house inventory app as a means to notify customers when we are taking orders. This means a purchase on our website is actually reserving a position in our build queue rather than having the physical unit(s) in stock and is why we show a delivery time of 7-10 days on our Homepage.
We honestly work 7 days a week attempting to keep up with orders but unless we manage the flow of new business, we will continue to fall behind and our backlog will only continue to increase. We have tried numerous varied and different methods to control order flow. Everything from staying open until the backlog became too large and then closing to catch up, to opening the website to orders on specific days for a limited number of units. Every iteration we have attempted has understandably bothered different folks for different reasons.
Now the pandemic has add new "challenges" in the form of PVC resin shortage (our enclosures), PTFE resin shortage (Teflon tubing) and with lead times for winding coax at 31 weeks and Teflon at 39 weeks. Let us also not forget the "modified operations" recently put in place by USPS....whatever that may mean.
We are committed to keeping delivery times as short as possible and not allow our backlog to approach 80-100 units. To reach this goal we have no choice but to manage the flow of new orders. We apologize in advance and would welcome any constructive ideas to better serve our customer base.
2-15-22 We will attempt to manage order flow by adjusting available "inventory" which in our case is an order position. To this end, we have installed a new service that will notify you when a particular unit is available. We will also use this service to better understand product demand and where we should focus our building efforts.
Please use our new "Notify Me" utility found on each product page so we can communicate with you when we open for orders on each unit.
5-8-22 If you find our website closed to orders on the same day you were notified a product was available, this means we have reached our max number of orders for the week and needed to close to new orders until the next available date. This has been happening frequently and causing shutdown between 2pm and 5pm the same day. Again our apologies but we just have no way around it.