For all you people complaining about orders place in June and not shipping your being a little overzealous.
I place an order on April 21, I believe that was the first or second day of pre-orders. Mine still hasn’t shipped.
I know @Eric_Inovelli and Team are doing all they can to get these moving and from what he posted ZWP seams to have slid a fast one on the Inovelli team which is unfortunate.
They’re just light switches guys cool your jets, you’ll get them and they’ll be great as inovelli products always are.
Well so real world math from the company I work with: Average order lookup, picking, packing, shipping is about 15mins per order per person. (So 5000 orders, X 15min each / 60 mins = 1250 hour.) . Now in a warehouse distribution workers national average are on average only productive for about 75% of their schedule, so if 8hours that means only 6 hours are productive.
So with that info 1250 hours to fill 5k in order and 6 hours per day of real work (1250 / 6 = 208)
So 208 days to fill the order if only one person work on it. I would guess about 10 people will be assigned to the packing at min, so were looking at 21 days to fill all order if they work weekends. And I could see they would get a bunch of temp people in to help, say total of 20 people. now were down to about 10 days. This seams like a realistinc expectations from when they start working on the orders.
Yeah, I’m also curious about what percentage of orders have been shipped. If ZWP has enough manpower that the orders would take about two days to ship (Eric said “all product is being shipped today/tomorrow”), it seems like they should be at least half way through by now. But if that were the case, it’d be extremely unlikely that nobody here has had their order shipped yet (I didn’t actually count, but I’m just guesstimating that about 10 people have said they haven’t received any shipping notice). I think there’s less than 0.1% chance that a random selection of 10 orders are all unshipped if 2500 of 5000 orders have been shipped.
April 22, 70 switches, unfulfilled. I don’t mind the delay, but if ZWP runs out of stock after having favored their own customers over spring pre-orders I’m going to be pretty bummed at them.
I ordered 6 switches through zwave products and got them yesterday. 1 day shipping from NJ to 1 state over. Crazy that they did it this way I only ordered a few weeks ago.
All of my preorders are unfulfilled. Yet, the one single switch I decided to order from ZWP in late September shipped. Sorry, but I can’t help but have serious doubts about a distributor who does this. ZWP not understanding the importance fulfilling preorders in the order they were placed is just baffling to me.
If it happens, that’s one way to describe my reaction. More apt ways are NSFW.
But ZWP’s demonstrated greed (or ineptitude - I’m not which of those truths is worse) so far now has me legit concerned this may be a real possibility. I’m trying to stay positive though… I’m sure Eric is chin-deep in trying to get this all back on the rails as we speak.
Using Almunder’s analysis, it’s a good thing that Inovelli did not try to do the order fulfillment. As Eric had responded to a prior comment, they have dropped the number of employees to around 5. It would not make any sense for that group to be doing nothing else for 42 days.
What Inovelli has not done a great job on is meeting schedules, but this is part and parcel with dealing with a small company. The latest is to be expected. When I saw the picture of the pallets of switches, my first thought was “Man, how are they were going to deliver them in a week”.
I am curious what ZWP promised for the distribution time. Did they over promise? Or was it that when plans were being drawn up, Inovelli was expecting partial shipments? When I tried to look them up, the information indicated less than 25 employees. I would expect their warehouse staff to be less than 10. So the calculation of Almulder of 21 days is probably correct, as long as they dedicate all their resources to fulfilling the Inovelli batch. But, even that doesn’t sound right, as ZWP would scale their warehouse force to match their ongoing order fulfillment cycle of other products they sell.
It is up to Eric to have a heart to heart with ZWP and report the reality of the schedule of order fulfillment to a near rabid fanbase, be it 2 weeks or 2 months. I can deal with that, I may not be happy, but I can plan around it. If I were building a house, as several respondents in the forum have indicated, it would be critical to get the delivery status. I only hope that there aren’t a couple of divorces inspired by this. Having a house built is taxing enough on a relationship, without this added stress.
As to doing a significant house install with a hot off the boat design is asking for trouble. Being the engineer that I am, I believe in a test before you run approach. Personally, I’ve got a half dozen test rigs set up to work the bugs out before these babies are going in the wall. This includes checking out the bulb flicker with 10 different bulb types, as well as RF transmission throughout the house.
With all that said, I’m still salivating to get them in house!
Try creating an account with the email you checked out with-- the system changed over, and I had to re-create a new account to access my order status. The original email link was dead, but the order status became available once I created a new account.
I have 100 switches on order for a current house project and if the shipment delays push past next week the timeline hits Christmas and New Year’s for getting the job done. So while they are only switches, the delay is going to add additional weeks to the job and me telling my wife that we will not be in the home for Christmas.
I would just like a response from ZWP on how long this is going to take so I can reschedule electrical/drywall/paint/etc… as I was starting to get it all scheduled based upon previous communications.
April 21st (day 1) pre order here. Still unfulfilled. I made sure to put in my order before spreading the news on reddit about pre orders being available. I wouldn’t doubt I’m in at least the first 15 orders. I’m wondering if they even started yet.
I am beginning to wonder if ZWP is telling Eric to pound sand, on the basis that Inovelli simply doesn’t have the cash flow to fight back. At the end of the day ZWP doesn’t need to care about Inovelli or its customers - they’ll sell product regardless of who makes it. Thus, it makes sense for them to waffle on fulfilling preorders for as long as possible - Their customers get their orders, install them, request replacements for the broken ones, and we get stuck holding the bag. All the better for them if it drives Inovelli out of business, because if this is actually what they’re doing there’d be no reason for Inovelli to ever let them sell their products again.
Of course that’s a very cynical look at the situation, and it’s also possible that ZWP misrepresented their ability to distribute for Inovelli, or any other number of things have gone sideways to introduce delays.
What concerns me is that Inovelli doesn’t seem to have a good understanding of what is actually happening at ZWP, or if they do, they’ve avoided telling us.
Like you I’m just replacing existing switches for the joy of it so it’s not that big of a deal to me, but If I were waiting on 70 switches I’d be reasonably concerned at this point.
I just built a new house… my suggestion is, put in dumb switches and then replace them with the inovelli’s when they come in. That’s what I’ve done. Sure, there are some added costs for dumb switches that you won’t need, but if you are able to replace them yourself, instead of an electrician, you’ll only eat in to your time and not your wallet to replace them.
I would much rather do that than delaying all of those contractors and missing your chance to be in a house for the holidays - all because of a light switch supply chain issue.
Or if you are cscott with 100 switches. My advice to him is install standard wall switches now, instruct the electrician to have a neutral in every switch box, mark the wiring against a schematic to ease wiring any 4 and 5-way circuits, and save your marriage. That way you remove the current drama, but can easily go back and retrofit later.