CEO's Message

Message from the CEO

2019 has been a year of changes for myself and the ABGA. As a rule, changes can be challenging and this year's changes did not disappoint. Dealing with the new office here in San Angelo has been one of the biggest changes. Moving a business is a little different than moving from house to house. With that said we will be relocating in mid-November. We could be detached from the Internet, which includes phone and emails, for 48 to 72 hours during this transition. It is probable members will subjected to some loss of services during the move.

This summer’s busy season proved to be the most challenging of my tenure with the ABGA. I suspect it was a combination of compounding issues that made this one more difficult. The constant demand for input on a building, loss of key personnel at the beginning of peak registration season, and changes to the prior year’s rules. The large number of rules that govern us combined with a specialized database makes replacing personnel on the run a difficult task. This year’s roll out of the donor dam DNA requirement caught many members in its web.

Why is it that some work takes an extended period

of time for the ABGA to complete? It is not that simple unfortunately. The “catch 22” of incoming and outgoing work is complicated because every case is not always member friendly. How can not getting work out fast not be member friendly? Let me explain. For the office to simply open a work order and process it as we receive it means if you have any errors in your work or missing data like a service memo, flush report, lack of DNA, fields on application not filled out etc. that portion of your work is closed and you receive only what you submitted properly prepared and a request for additional information for that was not properly submitted to be worked back in the mail. If you are on electronic notification and respond immediately, you may be lucky enough to get it reopened before it leaves the office. If you do not respond quickly or if you are not on electronic notification, it is a bit more painful. Your work is closed out. The issue date on an original registration certificate is established by when the work is received at the ABGA office as long as it can be worked. If it is closed out and later resubmitted, the issue date will then correlate with the date the resubmission is received. If a show like the ABGA Nationals requires registration by a certain date this can become major issue.

Let me recap how ugly this can be in the busy season. Just for example say, if it took the mail four working days from your house to office, then it takes 10 working days for the office to get to your work in the order it was received in, and it takes the mailman another four working days to get it back to you the total days spent to get a null result depending on number of weekend days that have to be added in could now be at 24 days lost to get nothing done. The bad part at this point is you are going to have to spend another 24 days to try again once you make the corrections or provide the information required that was not received in your original application.

Now let’s take another case where the office trying to be member friendly can work against you. Let’s call this case, “One Bad Apple Can Spoil the Whole Barrel”. Given the ABRI database utilized by a number registry services around the world only allows you to have one open work order at a time. Until it is closed, completed work builds within the order and is not mailed out. So follow this, you submit work to the office via the mail that is received date stamped, scanned in, assigned a work order number and placed in line to be worked in the order it was received in. The next day you decide to do some registrations with Online live and receive your temporary paper but the actual paper is placed within your existing open work order. Allow in the submitted open work is a registration application lacking a service memo and a staff member reaches out to you and or you notify the office you will provide it. The order stays open and all your completed work is on a shelf until we receive the needed information. Thus holding up everything that is ready to go until the last piece can be completed. If you are keeping up and recall we started with an Online live registration that you thought would be mailed out the following day. The reality here is say the office was at eight working days out when your Online registration order was completed you have racked up 9-11 days of hold time depending on how the weekends fell, plus the time it takes for you to provide the missing information and you still have the USPS mail time to get back to you to add to this equation. All of a sudden an Online live paper because of an overlapping piece of work takes two to four weeks with mail time before it gets to you.