Bag Stuffing
What Is This Role?
Our sponsors provide us with materials to put into the bag participants receive at registration. This all needs to be put into the bags and organized for registration to be able to hand them out. In order to do this rapidly, we build a human assembly line, where each station collects a type of items and passes them down the assembly line. While doing this we are constantly communicating about what supplies are needed, running low, or we are out of -- to make sure we give out as much sponsor material as possible.
Duties
- Preparing registration swag bags for all attendees
Accessibility
- May require standing for long periods of time (accommodations available)
Roles
There are several types or roles, and we tend to rotate people through the roles as much as is desired. The major roles are:
Supply Stocker
Tracking where all the supplies are located and making sure that all stations have all of the supplies. This is important as we want all of the bags to contain all of the items from the sponsors, and if a supply runs out then we may end up with leftovers or a sponsors item might not end up in all bags (which looks bad when that sponsor is then handed a bag without their own items in it through a random draw.
Assembly Worker
Responsible for creating a stack of nearby items, combining that stack with the stack moving up the line, and passing the merged stack down the line. Also responsible for notifying the Supply Stocker when they are running low of any materials. Additionally when a station runs out of any items, they need to notify the full assembly line as the change needs to be tracked at Packaging to make sure we prioritize which bags are handed out at Registration based on how full they are.
Odd Shapes and Bag Stuffer
This is the end of the assembly process, the people in this role will take the completed pile from the Assembly Workers and add any odd-shaped items, combining all of this and inserting them into the registration bag. The completed bags are then provided to Packaging
Packaging
This role is responsible for carefully packing the registration bags into boxes so the contents do not leave the bags and there is efficient packaging of registration bags into the totes. You must also mark the boxes with a “boarding group” in order of the amount of sponsor material in the registration bags. Boxes with registration bags containing all sponsor material should be handed out first (group 1), boxes with registration bags missing an item should be next (group 2), etc. Each group of boxes may be missing 1 or more items from the previous set, as sponsor materials run out either single or in batches (there might be a bunch of sponsors that all delivered 1000 items instead of 1500, for example. Or maybe a sponsor only wanted to send 500 discounts, etc. Typically this results in about 5 or 6 different groups of boxes. If there are weird bulky items that are boxed up independently (such as water bottles, or something similar) we can reach an agreement with Registration that those will be handed out alongside the bags and we don’t have to put that material into the boxes.
Delivery
Once the registration bags are completed, we then deliver them to the Registration storage site. When we deliver the boxes, we stack them so that as the boxes are pulled from storage, the lower number groups will be the first pulled from storage (so if we end up with 6 groups, 6 will be at the very back, then 5, then 4, up to 1 at the very front). We don’t deliver until we have built all of them in case we discover a problem (ex: as we are going through materials we discover an item that we missed) that requires us to go back through the boxes and add material.
Assembly Line Processing
Make sure people pulling materials for the bags have piles of material to use. Bundle similar types of items together, stack with smaller previously bundled items Put completed material bundles into bags Coordinate placement of bags to simplify registration pulling the bags - Bags organized into boxes or totes, or stacked nicely where directed. - Bags with the most materials in them should be prioritized first for registration