Elves sorting through the mountains of letters to Santa
Santa's home in Lapland
Although its a hectic time currently in Lapland we’ve been contacted by one of Santa’s Elves. He said he thought it was time things were modernised in the grotto and was looking to progress his systems. He had seen our video on our website which tells you all about electronic document management. Santa liked the way our illustrated system improved productivity without the need for extra elves, so he asked one of his chief elves to get in touch.
He told us in the quieter period during Lapland’s summer Santa’s elves have created a database which could match names to things like mobile numbers and email addresses. Santa has asked us if its possible to replace the normal letters children write with either SMS texts, emails, or a web-based contact form after all the children are getting on with technology far faster than the rest of us.
He felt this would help let him collate presents much faster, speed up production, and even mean that they could reduce delivery routes, streamlining the whole operation so perhaps he would also need less reindeer? We pointed out initially to him that we thought with Christmas he would need the full complement, Rudolph, Donna, Blitzen etc, but that conversation was cut short as he had to take a call back from a supermarket chain apparently enquiring about the tenderness of Reindeer meat.
Anyway after further discussions, we agreed that it would be possible to receive an email with Santa Wish List in the title, or a text with the same in the first line, which could then be matched to the database and create a production plan to select and wrap the presents.
Using digital mapping we could even optimise the delivery route and he’d therefore be pre-warned of any potential problems. We would combine this with satellite tracking and once he’d got to grips with laptop, the Elves felt sure Santa would know his location at any point. We thought about using a 3G system to minimise costs, but that would mean many children in Suffolk and Norfolk villages would end up with nothing!
So with this plan we’ve been over to visit Santa, (yes he does exist) before we went through our system I asked him about the traditions of eating mince pies and drinking sherry. I also asked when the hugging mum bit came in as I remember him doing that when I was little, and probably for longer than was appropriate. He looked a bit confused about that and said it was not something he was aware of. So we swiftly moved on instead to discussing the plan we had agreed with the Elves. Santa listened intently and then smiled and said that for many years he had used his current system effectively and the Elves had forgotten one major element of his current system; magic. That factor made sure that every year he was always ready by December the 25th and he could deliver millions of presents across the world in less than 24 hours.
Based on his excellent track record and the fact that each year we all get the presents we want (despite duplicating sock requests on numerous occasions) we felt in this instance our paper-less system was not going to make any improvement to Santa’s traditional production method – well for now at least.