That being said, I would like to apologize to ALL of our great customers - no matter if you are Distributor, Authorized Dealer or our valued retail customer - about the confusion I have caused in hastily starting another Standing Order Program the first of the New Year. We encountered some issues with production of our #4325 L&N 40’ PS1 boxcar thus creating a very limited supply available to sell.
Our Kadee Quality Products Co. family has had some devastating life events happen that had drastically altered our HO Scale RTR car production specifically. One of the wonderful things about having very dedicated long-term employees is the stability, quality, and accountability they bring every day. The unfortunate side is that as we all age, so do our families and health. In the last half of 2019 our coworkers sustained great losses of lives of family members and horrible health issues.
The greatest effect was the changes I decided to make regarding our RTR car production around July 2019: eliminating the Pre-Order Program and pre announcing the road name or type of RTR freight cars we were going to make. For over 3 years we have tried hiring 14 different individuals to learn the paint & print department jobs for our RTR cars. The exacting details, proper scaling, placement of images, reporting marks, and the critical process of matching paint and prints with no tolerance for errors was too stressful for them. In addition, the two wonderful ladies responsible for our fantastic cars were down to what was truly a half a person working part time trying to do what 2 full time people were doing from April until December.
Fast forward to January 2020. We now have a 2nd generation employee who has picked up learning this critical job and we are hopeful that she continues producing the finest HO Scale ALL AMERICAN MADE cars in model railroading. Before we began announcing what we were going to make (about 8 years ago), Kadee never announced what was going to be offered circa 1998. Everyone would have to wait to know once they received their monthly snail-mail flyer. This would create anticipation and excitement as a new road would be released by Kadee.
January 21, 2020 Trying to move with the times, Kadee implemented a Pre-Order Program to augment our Authorized Dealers’ Standing Order Program. The Standing Order Program meant they would be guaranteed at least 1 of every car we made and many Authorized Dealers chose to have more of each road. In doing so, Authorized Dealers got these new releases shipped automatically a couple of days prior to the flyer release. After many years of this program, we again changed and added a Pre-Order Program to help benefit Authorized Dealers, Distributors and retail customers by allowing them to select the roads they desired rather than take everything we made. This would also benefit Kadee’s in-house production if the schedule was far enough out to enable manufacturing of enough cars to fulfill standing orders and pre-orders with a 15% overage. Many issues can hamper finished production totals and the Pre-Order Program did not provide the benefits as we had hoped for all parties.
Therefore, I made the decision to eliminate the Pre-Order Program and stopped announcing the cars we were going to make after December 2019. Now that we are on track for ramping up RTR car production, we will institute a new Pre-Order Program and also augment our traditional Standing Order Program in the near future with specific details for all of our great customers.
Alan Vezzani
President
Kadee Quality Products Co.
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