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There's obviously some tradeoff between hiring more people to process and verify an increased number of applications at faster throughput. Shipping times from D

There's obviously some tradeoff between hiring more people to process and verify an increased number of applications at faster throughput. Shipping times from DE/DC to CA are probably longer than coast-to-coast in the Netherlands, etc. At the end of the day, 5 weeks standard, 2 weeks priority, and X days rushed are perfectly reasonable turnarounds for a process that only needs to be done once every ten years. Uploading my documents took <10 minutes and I wouldn't have needed it any faster. This is a far stretch from "terrible" and optimizing it for more capacity is probably a waste of resources.

Aaargh20318 4y ago
> There's obviously some tradeoff between hiring more people to process and verify an increased number of applications at faster throughput. But that’s the thing. You need a certain throughput, and it shouldn’t affect the wait time. If you get X passport applications per day, and you can only produce less than X per day, your wait times will keep increasing over time. So at the minimum you need the same amount of production capacity as you have applications, preferably a little bit more. Assuming this is the case, then there must be something else causing the delays. Sure, there can be a small queue due to fluctuating orders but surely not 5 weeks ? So there are two possibilities: either it actually takes weeks to manufacture the document, which seems odd, or it only takes a couple of minutes but there is some reason it takes 5 weeks before production is started. > Shipping times from DE/DC to CA are probably longer than coast-to-coast in the Netherlands, etc. Shipping for pretty much everything in the Netherlands is next-day. But I see no reason why you have to ship from the other side of the country. You can run a big country as if it was a collection of small countries. Isn’t that kind of what US states are anyway ? You have 20 times the number of people as the Netherlands, why not have 20 production facilities spread around the country ?
- cosentiyes 4y ago
  > If you get X passport applications per day submissions and throughput fluctuate and the quoted times are obviously estimates based on what the government has decided is a reasonable expected value for their target opex spend given historic application rates. I don't see why it's surprising that they chose some target timeline and staffed accordingly. > why not have 20 production facilities spread around the country ? because that's horribly inefficient and there's not point in spending resources to bring down a perfectly reasonable renewal time for a once-a-decade process

Aaargh20318 4y ago

> There's obviously some tradeoff between hiring more people to process and verify an increased number of applications at faster throughput. But that’s the thing. You need a certain throughput, and it shouldn’t affect the wait time. If you get X passport applications per day, and you can only produce less than X per day, your wait times will keep increasing over time. So at the minimum you need the same amount of production capacity as you have applications, preferably a little bit more. Assuming this is the case, then there must be something else causing the delays. Sure, there can be a small queue due to fluctuating orders but surely not 5 weeks ? So there are two possibilities: either it actually takes weeks to manufacture the document, which seems odd, or it only takes a couple of minutes but there is some reason it takes 5 weeks before production is started. > Shipping times from DE/DC to CA are probably longer than coast-to-coast in the Netherlands, etc. Shipping for pretty much everything in the Netherlands is next-day. But I see no reason why you have to ship from the other side of the country. You can run a big country as if it was a collection of small countries. Isn’t that kind of what US states are anyway ? You have 20 times the number of people as the Netherlands, why not have 20 production facilities spread around the country ?

cosentiyes 4y ago
> If you get X passport applications per day submissions and throughput fluctuate and the quoted times are obviously estimates based on what the government has decided is a reasonable expected value for their target opex spend given historic application rates. I don't see why it's surprising that they chose some target timeline and staffed accordingly. > why not have 20 production facilities spread around the country ? because that's horribly inefficient and there's not point in spending resources to bring down a perfectly reasonable renewal time for a once-a-decade process