Zillablog

Things are looking better in production. We’ve been increasing volumes some to try to meet demand, which hasn’t helped that much since it seems demand is increasing to meet volumes. We have just started into the new year’s orders where HV and EHV models get some priority. Priority is our partial answer to requests from people wanting to pay more to get a Zilla faster, so we are building the more expensive ones as a higher percentage of production than the base model, insuring faster delivery. This policy has just started to take effect since orders before the change were still being built on the old priority. The last check shows that we are almost done with all but the latest Z2Ks on order, and some Z1K-HV’s are shipping that were only four months old. The Z1K-LV is still projected in the 6-7 month delivery time.

It has been satisfying to see that our primary boards are having all surface mount parts built on the pick and place robot. This is saving a significant amount of production time and allowing the assembly workers (who turned out great by the way) to get ahead on the things like power boards which we still do by hand. Additionally the automated test machine is making good progress. It now tests all the Hairballs that are built and saves quite a bit of hassle while doing a more thorough test than we were able to do by driving each one in a car.

In other news: Running this company in production has made me well aware that although I may be a decent designer of controllers, I’m not well suited to running and growing a production company. This is partially shown by my resistance to grow production as quickly as an astute business person would do, and also has shown up with what the stress has done to my personal health. For that reason I am looking for an appropriate licensee who can take over production and free my time for developing more products. I am in talks with a few people who may turn out to have the resources, experience and quality required to meet my standards. Hopefully we’ll have some news within a few months leading to a production arrangement that can meet customer demand.

Once again, thank you for your patience

-Otmar