All of us at RAMA WORKS are cognisant of the significant wait times for some of the products that we offer, and no one wants to get these products out quicker than we do - there are zero benefits in making them take longer than they should to produce. At the forefront of our business is quality which is why it can take so long for our products to manufacture. It's a difficult position to be in; we don't want our customers missing out on the products we offer, so we provide open unlimited preorders rather than limited preorders. If it was the latter, we could easily set a deadline and give a more accurate timeline to our products.
Behind the scenes, we're working hard to get all these products out as quickly as possible - each keyboard takes hours alone in machining time. That being said, we absolutely understand that our recent preorders have taken much longer than previous ones.
Last year was a difficult one, the pandemic situation completely changed how we usually engineer our products, and it pushed our timelines back. As mentioned in a previous update, we used to travel to our manufacturers every few months to oversee manufacturing, discuss expectations/timelines and personally QC products - we have not been able to do that for over a year now and that has affected our process.
Instead, we have batches of the completed products air-shipped to us. This can end up being extremely time consuming if something isn’t up to our standards. A completely new batch of production samples have to be remade and re-sent to us. Repeat as many times necessary!
In an attempt to mitigate this, we’ve now implemented additional QC Managers to oversee the production line, and hopefully reduce the amount of times we have to go back and forth.
Again, we want to release products we’re proud of so we make sure that everything is done to our expectations which can result in extended lead times.
We've already invested heavily into adding more machines to our production lines to increase output for our upcoming product runs. We have also hired additional staff to provide customer support through our support channels.
We'll be providing more updates, more often. Starting in February, project updates will be posted twice a month.
We're now also working closely with other suppliers to access their machines to spread production load. Moving forward, we're doing everything we can to shorten manufacturing times and are looking forward to releasing all the products we've been working on for this year!
In other news, we’ve installed the pallet racking at our warehouse and hope to have the warehouse hardware in by end of week so we can begin processing keyboard orders for the next big batch to go out! 💛