Penn Line History 8

I mentioned in the last section that having more space did not solve all the problems of expanding the product line. I had first hand experience with this during the summer of 1961. This was the only time that I worked at the factory. I was just 16 that year. You had to be 18 to work around machinery, but at 16 I could work in the shipping department. Penn Line's basic procedure was to try to keep ready to ship some of the most popular sets already packed and also a supply of individual cars and locos which would be assembled into sets by the shipping department when the order was received. This sounds reasonable enough. This system would probably work much better today. If you go into most fast food restaurants today, you would see a simple little computer where the orders are instantly displayed to the production crew. When all individual parts of the order have been prepared they are bagged by what corresponds to the shipping department. Simply put the "flow" is from the order taker to the production crew to shipping. There were no simple little computer systems in the 1960's at Penn Line. The "flow" at Penn Line was not this way. Typically an order went directly to the shipping department. We would then try to assemble the order, pack it, ship it. This probably worked fine in the early days when the product line was a half dozen loco kits and related parts. This system did not work well with the 37 different sets mentioned before. Production was able to keep on hand a well balance assortment of the product. But when an order from a distributor arrived it was not usually well balanced. Most distributors were regional and orders reflected the actual railroads operating in that region. One order might be nearly all Santa Fe while next might be heavily B&O. The only thing that could be counted on was the the distributor wanted the order shipped ASAP. So this is how it worked. The shipping department got the order first. They started to assemble the order. There was almost always some part of the order that was not ready to ship. Penn Line offered free freight on orders over a hundred pounds. If the whole order did not go out together, it cost more to ship but the customer still got free freight. In other words the company made less profit if the order was not shipped together. So someone from the shipping department would go to production and tell them what was missing. Production would then usually stop what they were doing and make a few of the missing product. The partial orders sat clogging up the shipping line. This system greatly lowered efficiency in the production process. As bad as this problem was it was not the final cause of Penn Line's collapse. That "honor" goes to Penn Line's final product.