Santa’s UAV Deliveries

Santa’s UAV Deliveries

Post from CatalinaNJB


Santa Claus is manufacturing gifts and presents like never before, with production going exceptionally well. A new toy is the “magic rock” toy, which has the ability to project someone’s thoughts to the rock for viewing. Santa ran into production issues when the supply of rock at the North Pole was running out, but after months and weeks of production Santa finally completed these super-orders and is set for deliveries all over the world.

Santa's improvement of effectiveness 

This year Santa had improved the SMS, or the Streamlined Mission Service, to include continuous improvement. During the pre-production period Santa did much research of industry standards for deliveries, but since Santa is the only supplier of this specialty delivery service, industry standards were not available. 

Over the years of deliveries Santa often crashed on roof-tops and damaged the equipment. These crash-variable were not only expenses which reduced profit, but also causing lack of customer service when presents were not delivered on time, or in good working order. In the old days, before technology and fragile freight handling, a crash or two on a roof top did not totally destroy, or damage the gifts and often the snow would cushion the impact. However, with the change in the gift market to almost all electronic gifts, the impact of service had changed. Santa reviewed the Santa Production’s SMS policy annually for applicability to operations, but some changes were not major, or immediate detectable. When reviewing the Safety Policy this year Santa Claus discovered a trend of incident reports and the affect it had on customer service and delivery reliability.

This year Santa had made an improvement to the delivery process by using the UAV, (Universal Autonomous Vessel), or drone. This improved process includes no-landing deliveries and is expected to improve customer service and delivery reliability. As a test-run, Santa loaded up the sleigh with samples and UAV. The size of the UAV fits in the Santa Sleigh by replacing the helpers. Santa completed the test-run and found this new process to be effective above and beyond expectations, but with two hazards. One was that the reindeer would not get rested since the UAV are launched on-the-fly. The other residual hazard was that by doing UAV deliveries, Santa’s long time personal contact with home-owners, home-decorations and getting stuck by climbing down the chimneys was identified as a hazard to customer service with a high probability that customers would be unsatisfied and search for other delivery options.

Santa's deliveries are tailored to individual homes

Santa had improved the delivery processes, but was not sure if the success story of this business over of Santa’s deliveries was the gift that people received, or if it was the many centuries visit from Santa that was behind the success. Santa had to implement a safety risk control, since there was a probability that the UAV’s effectiveness could ruin the business. Santa needed to monitor processes and collect data of customer satisfaction. As a safety risk control and data collection, Santa included a mini magic-rock that automatically sends back to Santa a customers’ satisfaction survey of delivery method and the impact that had on the appreciation of the gifts. Santa needed to know if it was his short visit to the families that made Christmas wonderful, or if it was receiving the presents.  Santa’s timeline for evaluation was established and for a review the success of this year’s service package prior to the Elves’ Delivery Review in May of 2017.

CatalinaNJB