Friday morning at Championship, with the help of Jinnel Robinson, Operations Coordinator & Resident Shipping Guru, I hosted FRC Live – The Robot Ship Show. I was called away part way through, but here’s what was covered:
Every year FedEx makes a very generous donation of a specific dollar amount worth of FedEx shipping. As the number of FRC teams grows and transportation costs go up, that dollar amount gets chewed up more and more rapidly every year. When the FedEx donation runs out, FRC has to find the funds to pay the difference. In 2009 we ran out of free shipping just before robots were shipped to Championship. This year, even with teams being more aware of their crate weights and being more careful with their shipping documents, we ran out of free shipping during week five. My thanks to the teams who tried to make the donation last as long as possible.
For those of you who don’t know this, robots are not shipped directly to the event venues. FedEx picks up your robot and ships it to a drayage site where it is stored securely until the event venue is ready. Venues are often booked for other events during the weeks before our competitions and don’t have room to accept receipt of our robots in advance. Shepard Exposition Services (SES) transports robot crates from drayage to the event and back again. Without both the help of FedEx and SES we would face a lot more challenges. My thanks to teams who do what they can to make FedEx and SES’s jobs easier.
Jinnel thanked teams who read section 4 of the manual. There’s a lot of detail in there. For instance, some teams pay extra to ship a tool crate in addition to their robot crate. Pit administration volunteers check during set up to make sure each pit has a crate and call FedEx if any crates are missing. Pit Admin doesn’t know how many crates your team shipped and might confuse a tool crate for a robot crate if it isn’t clearly marked. Team 100 (see photo) is a good example of how to do this right. This year all the robot crates made it to the Championship pit before the doors opened Wednesday night.
Jinnel also asked for feedback on new ways to communicate the robot shipping process to teams. We are interested in your input about how to make robot shipping easier to understand, so drop us an email at FRCTeams@usfirst.org to let us know what worked or didn’t work well this year.
International teams face special problems when trying to ship robots to North American events. Carla Proulx will be working with FedEx Express and SES this summer to streamline the process.
In closing, once the FedEx donation runs out each year, the remaining expense for shipping robots comes out of team registration fees. Please help us make the donation stretch as far as possible by watching your crate weight and completing your shipping documents carefully.
I hope to see you at FRC Live next year.
257 days to Kickoff
See you then!
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2 comments:
Bill, Would it be possible to make non Bag and Tag regionals that are geographically close to each other less chronologically close to each other so that teams can stay near home for all their events?
This would reduce the amount of shipping that FedEx would have to do between regionals and to pick-up or return crates to teams.
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