Many companies are going virtual nowadays, with more and more automated options available for many industries. Have you ever considered whether that might include Santa? Considering the fact that Santa has to deliver presents to most of the children across the world, Santa is definitely prime real estate for a virtual makeover. Here’s what would probably happen if Santa decided to go virtual.
The first change that would have to happen is a change in the way that Santa communicates with kids. It’s unlikely that Santa would want to personally communicate with each individual child, which means he would probably want to set up a “customer service” hub where elves could handle these letters.
On average, customer service agents handle around 50 calls per day. To call every child once per year, around 28,822 elves would have to work for Santa every year, making them nearly six times larger than the largest call center in the United States. Plus, they’d have to speak almost every language on Earth.
Manufacturing Toys
The toy manufacturing process is another place where Santa may be able to utilize automation. If he’s still using elves to make every toy by hand, he should instead consider moving toward automated toy manufacturing processes. That’s because automated toy manufacturing could be incredibly beneficial for his toy manufacturing.
The ToyMaker 3000 at the Museum of Science + Industry in Chicago can produce up to 300 toys per hour. If Santa is able to get his hands on some of these products, he could easily produce one toy per child for his delivery process. He would need about 200 manufacturing lines running 24/7 to produce this number of toys.
However, while 200 machines may seem excessive, it’s a significant labor savings over using elves. For every nine robots, a company can typically automate 140 full-time workers’ jobs. That means the automated toy manufacturing would replace 112,085 eight-hour elf shifts. Plus, automation tends to save 16-22% on labor costs.
Making Deliveries
If Santa insists on delivering all of his presents on Christmas Eve, that means he has to deliver 22 million presents per hour, breaking down to a staggering 6,100 presents per second. This is more than 24 times as many packages as UPS delivers every day. He might be able to alleviate some of the tension by using drones.
Much of the population likely doesn’t live in an effective drone delivery service, but around 55% of the children Santa would deliver to likely do. Santa will need around 12 million drones to deliver presents to the 289 million children around the world who live in an area that he could potentially deliver to with drones.
Coal for Naughty Children
The widespread belief is that Santa gives naughty children coal. The coal manufacturing process, however, might be the easiest one for Santa to tap into, given the fact that coal is already a huge business in the United States and beyond.
If every single child was bad this year and Santa needed to give every child a lump of coal, he would need 19,000 short tons of coal. The thing is, however, the United States produces a billion tons per day. This means Santa would only need 13 minutes of coal production to manifest enough coal to give every single child a bit.
Conclusion
The process of going virtual is one of the things that is plaguing many companies nowadays. Santa isn’t the only one who needs to think about ways that he can automate his business; 73% of CEOs from Fortune 500 companies have indicated that rapidly changing technology is the biggest challenge they face in their company. When you manage your company in a more technologically-minded way, you’re following in these footsteps and moving with the world.
Leave a Reply