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Reservations are not as important as everyone seems to think

Drex

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Your reservation is your place in line at a dealership, not nationally.

Think of it this way. A guy is standing in front of a bunch of buckets. Each bucket has a table next to it with a stack of playing cards, and each bucket has a number on it. The bucket represents an individual dealership, and the stack of playing cards represents the orders from that dealership. The number on the bucket represents the number of allocations that dealership gets and
the cards are sorted by reservation timestamp., oldest on top.

Now, that covers allocation and reservation timestamp. But what about shortages?

When the guy takes a card and puts it in a bucket, he is scheduling it to be built. Before he starts, he is told that Ford can't build any Hearts. (Commodity shortage) So, the guy goes down the line of buckets and picks up the top card. If it is a heart, he puts it down on the table and picks up the next card. If that card is buildable, it goes into the bucket.

He goes down the line of buckets, dropping one card in at a time, filtering out the unbuildable cards by starting a second stack, like you do in solitaire.

Eventually, some buckets have reached their allocation, so he starts skipping those buckets, regardless of how many cards are still on the corresponding table. If he gets to a table that is out of buildable cards, but the bucket still has room, he drops in Jokers instead, which represent "Dealer stock".

Why? Ford has to meet the allocation. Your reservation timestamp only determines your order of consideration during the process of selection, and is specific only to your dealership. If Ford can't build your Bronco, they won't. If Dealership A has 100 orders and 150 allocation, they are going to get 150 Broncos. If Dealership B has 400 orders and 200 allocation, they are going to get 200 Broncos. They are going to get those Broncos in order of availability of parts and then in order of timestamp.

Allocation then Availability then Timestamp. Customer comes last.

Except Ford doesn't see it this way because each Bronco will sell, and they will fill every custom order that came from a reservation. To the shareholders and upper-management, they are doing a fine job. As far as Ford is concerned, we are just a bunch of crying toddlers who don't understand "how the world works" or "Didn't understand what a reservation was."
No.

They do not go down the timestamps in sequential order by moving to different dealers.

Using your bucket example;

1st bucket had 30 allocations this month, they go down the deck of cards until they have run out of allocations or materials. If they run out of reservation orders they can build, let's say after 25 customer orders, the dealer can order five dealer stock orders. then they go to the next dealer/bucket and repeat. Big allocation dealers will soon go through all their reservation orders and get tremendous numbers of dealer stock built before many other reservationists are satisfied. This is the outcome that Ford intentionally chose to replace the timestamp promise. There will be big dealers with lots full of dealer stock before early reservations are filled at smaller dealers.
 

Cheshire

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No.

They do not go down the timestamps in sequential order by moving to different dealers.

Using your bucket example;

1st bucket had 30 allocations this month, they go down the deck of cards until they have run out of allocations or materials. If they run out of reservation orders they can build, let's say after 25 customer orders, the dealer can order five dealer stock orders. then they go to the next dealer/bucket and repeat. Big allocation dealers will soon go through all their reservation orders and get tremendous numbers of dealer stock built before many other reservationists are satisfied. This is the outcome that Ford intentionally chose to replace the timestamp promise. There will be big dealers with lots full of dealer stock before early reservations are filled at smaller dealers.
@broncoskip

You're both greatly simplifying the scheduling process. It is an optimization process where each order potentially has dozens of parameters. Discrete (Y/N) variables; 2Dr, Sasquatch, 2.7L, MIC top, tow pkg, lux pkg, high pkg, mid pkg, mod bumper, etc. Continuous variables; timestamp, dealer allocation. Every order has an overall utility score made up of all the parameters. You get negative points for hard commodities like tow, lux, bumper, perhaps positive points for easy commodities depending on how the problem is setup. Early reservations add to the utility score and later ones reduce it. High dealer allocation increases utility score.

The optimizer picks the best build based on above utility scores, which reduces available commodities used in that build, which in turn creates new utility scores for unselected. Then you pick the next best utility build and so on down the line until restricted commodities are used up. The programs are more slick than my basic description to be sure. Each parameter (i.e. has lux) has it's own penalty or importance in the overall function. So, you can alter the outcomes by giving more importance to the lux parameter for example. Knowing how to set the parameters to give production schedules that align with your objectives is an art and these parameters are played with constantly to modify scheduling. No one knows what build, at what dealer will be selected because everything scheduled affects everything waiting.

People complain that they are a day one reservation with such and such build and are pissed because some other guy in some other place with similar build got scheduled and they didn't. Well, that's how it works. The algorithms that do the scheduling are much more efficient than humans are and without optimization mass production would be far to cumbersome to implement.

You want a Bronco earlier? Then make your build easier. Get rid of things you can easily do later like mod bumpers, tow pkg, etc. Keep the stuff that's hard to do later like 2.7L, Sasquatch, etc.
 
 


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