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First off, please understand that the following is based upon my years as a Honda, and may not be how Yamaha operates...
But honestly, one has to look at this entire ordering/shipping/delivery thing a bit more from start to finish to perhaps grasp the nuances of what may be happening. Before anything else, you have to understand that essentially Yamaha USA (and Yamaha Canada, Yamaha Europe, Yamaha Australia, etc.) is a different and completely separate company from its Nippon Gakki Yamaha parent in Japan. For all intents and purposes Yamaha USA is a *customer* of Yamaha Japan, just as you and I are customers of our dealers, only that Yamaha USA has the exclusive right to be the only *customer* Yamaha Japan will sell to in the United States. Each year Yamaha Japan shows a catalog of various potential models that Yamaha USA (or Yamaha's other country distributors) can purchase in a future model year. In the old days the meetings for a given model year were held two to three years *before* the dealers saw them (it is probably quicker now). This was the lead time necessary for a lot of things to happen.
From here on in I will limit this post to Yamaha USA and Yamaha Japan in the interest of clarity and brevity...
So, Yamaha Japan shows a whole beau coup of models to the execs at Yamaha USA, and Yamaha USA has to decide which models they think they can sell in their market and how many of each of those they should order. They also have to pick from the colors offered, etc. Now with most models Yamaha Japan can build the product to US-spec, so when you see a model in a foreign market that is *NOT* sold in the USA, don't blame Yamaha in Japan for not bringing it here... Blame Yamaha USA. It's not here because they decided not to buy it from Yamaha Japan for whatever reason - not thinking they could sell enough, competing too directly with another model they decided to go with, wrong for the cultural climate, price too high, etc.
That's another important point to mention... Yamaha Japan has a relatively set price that it sells the model for to various distributors in countries, so when you see a higher price in one country as compared to another it is usually due to the distributor for that country setting the price too high - not Japan. If a given country;s distributor thinks they are only going to sell, say, 500 of a given model in their market area, then they may end up with a price 20%, 30%, 40% or more higher than another country where the distributor thinks he can sell 5,000. Of course, import duties, taxes, etc. can add to the price, but for the most part it is a distributor like Yamaha USA who sets the price.
OK, now suppose you have a distributor like Yamaha USA, and there's a model they think they would like to see in their market, but they're just not sure if it will sell in sufficient numbers to justify its importation costs, certification costs, transport costs, etc. and still sell at a price that makes a profit... What do they do? Well, they can bring in an absurdly small number and sell them as a limited edition, available to only select dealers that meet certain criteria, much like Honda did with RC-30's, or another option is something like Yamaha's PDP. In a program like this Yamaha USA does commit to Yamaha Japan that they will pay the certification costs, set up the necessary importation arrangements, and buy at least a minimal number of units, but in doing so they get Yamaha to agree that they can order more over a certain period if they can increase the number. They tell customers they can order the bike for a future period, give them a specific time frame they can order and place deposits in, and cut off at that date and present the order number to Yamaha Japan - hoping all the while that number exceeds the minimum they committed to when they told Yamaha Japan they wanted it.
On most cases bikes in Japan are built in batches over a finite period of time. This has a lot to do with their "just in time" sub-contractor and supply production methods. At one point they know just how many bikes are to be built for Yamaha USA and they allocate production line time to make 'em. Understand, at this point the bikes are *sold*... to Yamaha USA. And it is Yamaha USA that generates those nice letters to the PDP customers, organizes the PDP order numbers, places YDS images on dealer's computer screens, etc. - *NOT* Yamaha Japan. Yamaha Japan has no idea who the end customer is. They just build the 2,048 (or whatever number) USA-spec Yamaha Super Tenere's with 87.37% of them blue and 12.63% of them black (or whatever percentage), just like Yamaha USA ordered. These all get crated with USA-model labeled boxes and tucked away in a warehouse, awaiting the proper containers to put them in. One day these all get placed in containers and taken to the dock.
Now somewhere right in here Yamaha Japan notifies Yamaha USA the bikes are ready to put on the boat and gives the range of VIN's for the crated units. Now understand, Yamaha USA has absolutely *NO* idea of where a particular VIN is within any certain container. These days they know what container they are in, but they didn't use to know even that (in fact, in the real old, old days sometimes the bikes weren't even crated until they got here, and came over assembled, the Japs not quite understanding just how big the country of the USA is). All they know is a certain range of VIN's are in certain containers. Still, Yamaha USA has to start right then to start allocating VIN's to ordering dealers and the customer PDP orders so they are ready to start getting them out when they hit port.
Only there is one potentially odd hitch can happen here... Perhaps Yamaha USA has more than one POE (point of entry) into the USA - say one in Seattle and one in LA, or like Honda had at one time, LA and New Jersey (of all places). Now since Yamaha USA has already allocated the VIN's, what happens if one container lands in Seattle that has a bike due for Texas in it, while another container with bikes for Texas lands in LA? Well, they might take very different routes to get to their warehouses, right? That's one thing that can confound timely delivery.
But it can get screwed up here on the dock, too. The containers come off the ships and get hauled to the warehouse, though often those containers are unloaded at the dock and loaded into trucks. During all this crates can get shuffled around like cards in a deck, and two sequential serial numbers may not even get to the main LA warehouse at the same time. And this sort of thing happens over and over, with the crates continually shuffled and reshuffled. Trucks are loaded and unloaded, fork lifts buzz around with "pull sheets" to get certain VIN's, etc.... And as the game goes on there is more and more chance somebody who ordered later than you is going to get his bike first.
Now it looks to me like Yamaha USA did do one nice thing in this PDP... They at least attempted to get a representative number of units into *ALL* the warehouses before they gave the go-ahead to ship them out to dealers. That's not always the case. In the old days when I was a Honda dealer the East and West dealers *ALWAYS* got there product as much as two weeks before we did in Texas, and our warehouse was in Baton Rouge, LA. Anyway, back to Yamaha USA... I think they tried to make as sure as they could that there were enough bikes in all their warehouses to at least attempt to get 'em out at the same time, only then there comes another monkey wrench into the mix...
You see, I'll be most of these warehouses for Yamaha USA are run differently from each other. Rarely are they standardized. I doubt the one in Dallas has the same square footage, number of loading docks, fleet of forklifts, computer systems, etc. as say the one in Atlanta, or Chicago, etc. Hence, they all get bikes out the door at different rates. The Atlanta warehouse may be super-efficient while the Chicago one is bordering on inept... or vice versa. This can lead to vastly different unloading times, coding times, loading times and delivery times. Also, some warehouses have more dealers to serve, and one should also be quick to remember that during all this there are *OTHER* Yamaha products to be receiving and shipping at the warehouses. They don't revolve around Super Tenere's, and there are lots of Rhino's, Waverunners, generators, scooters, Star cruisers, etc. to get out, too, that all sell in bigger numbers than some one-off adventure touring mounts.
Last but not least, there is another problem that can sometimes crop up... All the proper VIN's for the Dallas warehouse may get there right on time - except one or two, who for some reason ended up going to Atlanta. Now one of these might be already earmarked for a guy who ordered his S-10 on the first day, while all the rest that got there to the proper warehouse were for guys who ordered November through March. Now if this occurs one of three things can happen... One, they can simply ship the bike direct to the proper dealer via truck, or two, they can ship it to the proper warehouse, or three, they can get in touch with Yamaha USA in California and see if two VIN's can be swapped in the computer so that one in the proper warehouse gets shipped to the customer along with ll the others...
Now again, I am not saying all this is exactly how things happen at Yamaha these days, but my guess is that I am real, real close. Product model decisions from manufacturer to distributor, pricing structure, production allocation, container packing, ship loading, trans-Pacific transport, container unloading, customs clearing, transportation of units to main warehouse, distribution of units to regional warehouses, unloading, loading of units to dealers, trucking to dealers, etc. is all a very intricate, complex dance that despite how it appears has very precise steps to follow, and despite the music or the instrument delivered to the final customer. It's amazing that the damn things ever get to us at all...
Here's another thing it always helps to remember...
- Yamaha USA (or your own country's distributor) is a *customer* of Yamaha Japan
- Your dealer is a *customer* of Yamaha USA
- You're a *customer* of your dealer
And believe it or not, each *customer* has many of the same problems dealing with who they get their bikes from!
Hope this helps!
Dallara
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