Anyone know the port of entry for QB kits arriving from the Philippines?
I notice there are 44 container ships stuck off the coast of CA.
Almost always it's the Port of Tacoma (Washington). It's not uncommon for stops and/or transfers to happen in Taipei or Hong Kong, where delays/waits can happen. Arrival back-ups are happening at all west coast US ports right now.
And, I will take the opportunity to provide a whole lot more detail about the potential for delays than your question asked for, by way of context.
Shipping delays in both directions, and in reality multiple sources of delays that have little to do with manufacturing processes, have been incredibly frustrating. All of the following have to line up, and while in "normal" times things went fairly smoothly, these days most of these steps include delays - and some of those delays are extreme and unpredictable.
- Supply chain, materials, "bought" parts ***
- Van's-controlled manufacturing delays **
- Shipping container availability **
- Truck available to bring shipping container to Van's **
- Loading of container with crated parts at Van's
- Truck available to take container from Van's to the port ***
- Available transport ship that can take the container *****
- In come cases, there is an intermediate port where container is transfered, wait for another available ship to destination ***
- Available truck to take the container to quickbuild facility
- (QB kit is assembled)
- Container available to load finished QB kits into ***
Note: For every one container of unassembled parts that we send to the QB assembler, about 10 to 12 containers holding assembled QB kits are shipped back to Van's)
- Truck to take the container to the port
- Available ship to return containers to USA ******
- Potential intermediate port stop and container transfer to another ship ***
- Arrival delays at US port (waiting offshore) ***
- Customs delays **
- Availability of offload crew and truck to move the container to Oregon **
- Inspection and kit crating (can be compounded in terms of volume when containers don't arrive on proper cadence/schedule - if we receive a bunch of delayed containers all at once, they may stack up until we can complete inspection and crating) *
The stars (*) indicate common delay items and the number of stars loosely indicates how much impact they tend to have (when issues occur) on actual turnaround time for our QB lifecycle.
Example: We've had one set of crates containing QB parts ready to go and waiting for a ship booking since May, which only yesterday had a container to be loaded into - and the ship booking was just canceled by the shipping company (this is very common), so we're having to put it on a ship that is scheduled to sail a couple of weeks later. The domino effects are quite significant.
That said, it looks hopeful that things are slowly starting to improve. Getting ships out of the Philippines is improving somewhat at any rate, and that's been a huge source of delays the past 6 months.