Hi guys,
I wanted to take a moment and chime in on this subject. The first thing to note here is that we absolutely do hear you, and that there hasn't been a week that's gone by without either this thread or the subject of rejections being mentioned in our planning and problem statements meetings. We feel this pain just as much as you guys and we're terribly sorry that this has been such a hard (and sometimes emotionally painful) subject to deal with for so long.
Secondly, regarding allowing designers to update and replace the file before issuing a permanent rejection. The short answer: yes, we're going to try to make this happen and we have some plans for how we can make this work.
The slightly longer answer requires sharing some backstory and insight.
When we first started tackling rejections a few years ago, they accounted for some ~23% of all order lines placed. Since then, we've been able to lower total amount of rejections down to about 8-9%, where only some ~1% are Shoppers purchasing a designer's product.
In other words, the large majority of rejections occur for designers who are purchasing their own products. We've tried to make this problem less painful for those designers by introducing instant refunds for rejections and by adding the ability to combine new orders with ones in progress.
We've also needed to improve the processes throughout our supply chain and internal/external manufacturing partners. Every time we bring on a new manufacturing partner, production engineer, checker, planner, etc, there's a lot of training and education that needs to take place in order to maintain a high level of consistency and quality. Efforts that keep increasing in complexity as we grow and scale our operations and footprint.
Which brings us back to the subject of enabling designers to replace the model file when there's a rejection.
We've had to be careful with not implementing this too soon, because it's likely that by doing so, we could have masked and hidden away the many deficiencies and process optimizations that first needed to be addressed. Our top priority is that we continue to offer a consistent, high quality service, even while greatly expanding our material portfolio and service offering.
Now that we have the right teams and processes in place to support the proposed workflow, it's next on our list. Our goal here is to try to make rejections not be an "end state" for as many cases as we can.
This process is broken down into 3 (possibly more) phases, and there are many things that we need to experiment with and learn from together with you, our community, for this to work properly.
Note a caveat here is that the order and contents of these phases may change depending on what we learn in the process.
Phase 1 - Customer Service initiated model file replacement
We will first establish a test group consisting of designers spanning many different categories of products and materials.
Designers in this test group who experience a rejection
when purchasing a print of their own designs will be notified and given the option to contact our Customer Service with an updated and revised 3D model file.
The actual rejected order-line will remain "on hold" until either the order is cancelled, an updated 3d model file is sent to the CS team who will manually replace the file using our internal backend tools, or a maximum time duration has passed and the order line is permanently rejected.
When a model file is updated from our side, it will go through all the normal model processing checks. If it successfully passes all checks for the purchased material, the order line will move back into the production queue as normal. If there are significant volume discrepancies (we will have to discuss together how much difference this exactly means), there may be a need to completely cancel the order line and re-order manually.
Lastly, designers will notice that the model revision/renders have been updated when visiting the model-edit page after it has been replaced by a CS agent.
Please note that it's likely that some materials might be excluded for this initial test phase, such as Gold and Platinum. We have not yet determined the list of which materials will be excluded from this phase.
For PIA (Print It Anyway) enabled materials, it's possible that we'll give the designer the option to ask the CS team to convert their order for that model to a PIA order, depending on the type of rejection in play.
Here are some of the most important things we're looking to learn from this initial phase:
- What is the average response / fix time per model file rejected?
- Does this differ for different materials or categories of products?
- What is the average model volume size discrepancies?
- How does this alter the price/cost of printing the design?
- Does this differ significantly across materials and categories?
- How does this process affect lead times and on-time delivery?
- Are designers happy with the results of this service and is it solving their problems sufficiently?
- What types of rejections are best solved with this process. What types may need additional work to resolve?
We'll use the learnings to roll out phase 2 to the test group once both Shapeways and you, the designers, are confident and happy with the results. We'll also likely expand the list of people who have access to this feature at this time, although we don't yet know exactly who and by how many.
Phase 2 - Designer Facing Model File Replacement
This phase involves providing a user-facing interface for designers to upload a new file for rejections they experience when purchasing their own designs. Depending on the learnings from phase 1, this may come with some requirements and restrictions such a maximum on 3d volume increase/decrease, and/or an additional payment requirement of some form, etc.
Once we're again confident that this is working as intended, we may roll this out to a greater audience, or possibly even open it up to everyone. We'll then kick off Phase 3 to the test group.
Phase 3 - Designer Facing Model File Replacement for Shopper Purchases
This phase will involve the ability for designers to update 3d model files that have been purchased by others (shoppers). Right now there are far too many open questions as to how this should work or what the criteria and conditions will be to go into any further details here.
And there it is: the future of rejections means everyone working together to make the Shapeways experience the best we possibly can. We look forward to rapidly receiving feedback and learning about what does and doesn't work.
Regarding the timeframe for when this project will start, the answer is
soon (tm).
There's a few projects already in flight that we first need to finish up, but after that we'll start working on the software tasks required for Phase 1.
In the mean time, you can expect to see planning/outreach/communication as we prepare taking on this project.
Lastly, thank you all for having been extremely patient with us, and for trusting that we'd do our best to solve this for everyone. Please don't hesitate to keep the conversation going in this thread, or to ask questions or provide thoughts and feedback that will help make this project successful
Best,