Nightmare

I don't get much sleep this time of year... about 2 hours a night on average. 4 hours of sleep would be like sleeping in. So I had only dozed off last night when I was stirred by that dreaded sound of the mobile phone vibrating on the nightstand next to my bed. I knew immediately that it wasn't going to be good.

It was Jingle on the other end of the line. Bo and Candy had just called him. All he could tell me was that there had been a fire at the production facility. He didn't know much more but he was on his way there. I told him I'd meet him there in 15 minutes.

I jumped out of bed and rushed across the Village. Even at that hour, the work was continuing. But I could hear the sirens still rushing to the production facility. "How bad was it?" is all I could remember thinking.

When I got there, they were still fighting the fire but it had been contained. Bo had organized a group of the team leads to beging accounting for everyone. It was another hour -- about 2am --before we knew that everyone was safe and accounted for. That was one of the longest hours of my life.

Jingle called an emergency meeting for 4am and Bo immediately began the process of assessing the damage. By the 4am meeting, Candy had enacted the disaster recovery and contingency plans, Bo had a full report on the damage, Ollie had a complete inventory report, Sprite had begun to contact suppliers about increasing the volumes we would procure rather than build, and Melody had the press releases ready to go. We had never faced this kind of challenge before but the team was truly rallying.

Bo estimated that we could have the facility running at 50% by end of day but it would take the entire week before we could be back up to 100%. Candy reported that our back-up facility... a hot site that has the raw materials inventory and tooling so that it can begin production with 2 hours notice... was only 30 minutes away from start-up. Team leads had already reported. Ollie cautioned that it would be another 4 to 6 hours before he could get a precise estimate but it appeared that over 40% of the total build plan was complete; however, he could make a high-level estimate. Given Bo's report on getting the facility back up & running and the capacity at our "hot site", Ollie estimated they would be able to cover about 80% of the requests. Sprite believed that she could work with suppliers to cover a large portion of the deficit but the fact remained that not every request will be filled exactly this year. Many kids will have to settle for some things that may be different than what they requested. This is disappointing but in light of how tragic it could have been, it has some perspective. Melody had some tough messages to deliver.

Most of my morning appearances were cancelled; however, by noon local time, I was headed back out to make mall appearances. I was able to work from the sleigh between cities and stay connected with the recovery efforts back at the Village. At Sprite's proddding, I placed calls to a few key suppliers as well as a large retailer based in northwest Arkansas to help "free up" the additional inventory we know we are going to have to acquire in light of the fire.

I arrived back at the Village well after 9pm and went straight to a meeting with Ollie to discuss how production from the hot site will be pre-positioned to the replenishment points. With the help of the brown company and an air frieght company based in Memphis, Tennessee, we will be able to maintain the current 22nd of December 11:59pm deadline.

And now I'm finally going to go get a few minutes sleep.