That’s the part that baffles me. Been noticing that trend and it makes no sense other than just very poor scheduling. Not uncommon in large manufacturing. The stuff I see daily where I work just makes me shake my head.
It could be due to a plethora of things, none of which they should be willing to explain because it definitely wouldn't make matters any better. Here are some possibilities:
-One is to a dealer who happened to have a nearly full carrier of trucks goin to their lot that week.
- It simply is the fact that they are not exactly identical and its the one part that's different which is the problem.
-One of them is in a region that needed just a few more trucks to squeeze out their sales goal for that month so they prioritized.
-One truck has a new product that management is pushing to hit a quota on.
- One is to a dealer whose last 5 direct customer orders got delayed so they decided to do them a solid.
-What if they ordered too many parts to make bed utility groups because they thought they were going to sell more of those than they did. So to get this stock down (which frees up cash flow) they have decided to prioritize orders with bed utility group.
Not saying that these are the types of things that happen or that if they do they are justified. But not explaining their production scheduling process to their customers is very justified. The people calling the shots on these production schedules probably have decades of experience and make lots of American dollars to do it. I am the opposite as most of you- I'm pretty impressed they have been able to keep it somewhat together and deliver this many trucks in this supply chain environment. If I thought it was due to incompetence I wouldn't order a truck from them. That doesn't mean it's not partially due to incompetence , which is rampant in large businesses. But some other automanufactures simply wont even give an ESD or anything of the sort. In fact every other truck manufacturer had a larger decrease in sales in 2021 than RAM, likely 100% due to supply chain constraints.