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 p.7 #13 · Nikon D800 & D800E Pre-order! | |
one crucial assumption is probably wrong by Eamon Hickey
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=41140764
Nikon knew how many they would be able to produce, on what schedule ... well as when and where they would ship them. B&H, like everyone else, placed orders. And Nikon gave allocations to B&H, like they did to everyone else, telling them how many and when to expect them. This all happened months ago.
This last part is not a safe assumption at all. I was a Nikon USA sales rep for most of the 1990s, and in that decade none of the above was true. It's possible it's different now, but I doubt it.
When I was a Nikon sales rep, Nikon USA absolutely did not tell dealers ahead of time how many units of any backordered product they would be allocated. Nikon didn't even tell its own sales reps (i.e. me). Shipments into my territory (northern California and Utah) were always a complete surprise to me.
And allocations were made, by the Vice President of Sales, usually on the day before the product was scheduled to ship out of the warehouse. There's a very simple reason for this: Nikon's sales managers wanted to retain flexibility about where cameras went right up to the last minute. They wanted to be able to shift allocations around if, for example, a super high priority customer suddenly ordered, say, 200 units from a dealer in Washington D.C. or one in Chicago or one in Indiana (there's a big-time pro dealer in Indiana).
Who might place an order like that? The Pentagon or the FBI or the Associated Press, to take just a few examples.
Very few people know that NPS members are actually not on the top spot on the priority allocation list. The U.S. federal government is. If the Defense Department wants 200 D800s, they'll get 'em, or most of 'em, even if that means making individual NPS members wait, and certainly if it means making regular customers wait. (The federal government can order directly from Nikon USA, but a retail dealer is given a credit for the purchase because dealers are usually involved in the government agency's buying process -- advice etc.)
So when dealers tell you that Nikon does not tell them what's coming and when, they're almost certainly telling the complete truth.
Whether any of these practices are the best way to do things is a different question -- you could certainly ask why the Defense Department should be considered more important than you. And the overall lack of supply chain communication from Nikon (all parts, Japan included) is definitely bad practice. I'm not defending the rationale here; just explaining the way it's done (or definitely was done ten years ago, and probably still is).
Bonus trivia: In the early 1990s, Nikon's Sales V.P. (my boss then), told me that the FBI was the U.S.'s largest single consumer of photographic products. That would have been mostly film, paper, and chemistry, of course, so I doubt it's still true (and I think if the four branches of the armed forces were lumped together, they would have been larger). But it was a surprise to me.
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