2023 New pilots?

[YugTegrat]

It's for TSS. But I could see it being expanded into captain/specialist roles in the future. What's old is new again for a lot things so it wouldn't surprise me if they did this.

Yup, exactly my thought as well. It seems to be around $2 - $2.50 more on average than PG35, so still nowhere near PG45, but enough of an increase over PG35 for certain positions that may be suffering from excessive turnover (FSA) or have a specialized workload (receiving, plano, pricing, etc..).

 

[Yetive]

Bring back the GSAs!

 

[TurgetCirkl]

The new Pilot is working out very well so far. Honestly its kinda funny I knew about the pilot before the ETLs in my store did LMAO.

My store is an overnight store and since overnight is already a minority pre pilot, post pilot corp basically said "yeahhhhhhh here is x amount of hour... figure it out" and we've been doing a pretty good job to the point where corp reached out to my SD and said "Every other overnight store is doing poorly. how are you doing things right now?"

 

[balthrop]

The new Pilot is working out very well so far. Honestly its kinda funny I knew about the pilot before the ETLs in my store did LMAO.

My store is an overnight store and since overnight is already a minority pre pilot, post pilot corp basically said "yeahhhhhhh here is x amount of hour... figure it out" and we've been doing a pretty good job to the point where corp reached out to my SD and said "Every other overnight store is doing poorly. how are you doing things right now?"

"well we took what you said to do and bin'd that shizz and then proceeded to do what works. Each store is different ASANTS and all that". would be the answer 🙂

 

[TurgetCirkl]

"well we took what you said to do and bin'd that shizz and then proceeded to do what works. Each store is different ASANTS and all that". would be the answer 🙂

to an extent lol

 

[Dysprosed]

Just an update from my store. As "Merch Ops TL," I am basically a Pricing & Presentation TL. I would say Instocks too, but the only real concern around this is "Was RFID completed? Was Inventory Audit completed? It was? Great. Spare me the details."

District wants our Price Change Unit Completion % at 80. Prior to the Pilot, for last year, it was sitting at around 40%. I have improved it to 70%, but haven't gotten much credit for it. Just a "Why isn't it 80%?" Maybe the 50 heaping guest carts of Style abandons hidden throughout the store?

At any rate, I do enjoy the job. But it just feels like its structured in a half ass way. Since losing backroom, backroom location accuracy has plummeted by about 2% and PF % completion has reduced by about 20%. Yet we were getting chew out daily for not having it higher. Well it's way worse now!


I blame the lack of resources being thrown our way on the challenges the company is having with the fact that Fulfillment/Drive-up eats up so much payroll. Imagine spending 26% of your total stores payroll on something that you wouldn't need to spend a dime on if the guest just came in and purchased it themselves. Not having OPU would cause top-line revenue to plummet. But profit margins would be far better and you could reallocate those resources to executing your other processes in a more profit driven way.

Alas, the calculus is quite complicated, and the solution isn't super apparent. But there are a lot of cost cutting measures that don't have to involve payroll being at a less than bare minimum. Spend more, get more.

 

[YugTegrat]

I blame the lack of resources being thrown our way on the challenges the company is having with the fact that Fulfillment/Drive-up eats up so much payroll. Imagine spending 26% of your total stores payroll on something that you wouldn't need to spend a dime on if the guest just came in and purchased it themselves. Not having OPU would cause top-line revenue to plummet. But profit margins would be far better and you could reallocate those resources to executing your other processes in a more profit driven way.

This seems to be the #1 issue. Stores have payroll and bodies to get things done, we know that from how it all worked before. It's when a large portion of that payroll and those bodies end up being dumped into OPU and SFS that everything falls apart.

It honestly feels disruptive by design with how backup from other departments is relied on so much that it should no longer be considered "backup".

 

[flow4areasonuno]

This seems to be the #1 issue. Stores have payroll and bodies to get things done, we know that from how it all worked before. It's when a large portion of that payroll and those bodies end up being dumped into OPU and SFS that everything falls apart.

It honestly feels disruptive by design with how backup from other departments is relied on so much that it should no longer be considered "backup".

It's gotten to the point here where ETLs are doing DU, which is good but I've never had higher level managers doing 'regular' stuff like that so frequently in any other retail job I've had

It sucks for front end because we aren't generally well staffed and when we are they steal people for DU and OPU

Which results in more backup calls!

 

[FlowTeamChick]

Don't know how it compares to other stores, but my store has a lot of OPU and SFS orders. If all those OPU orders were shopped the usual way, how many more cashiers would we need? Our front end already suffers terribly from call-offs and they're constantly calling for backup.
Our ETLs and TLs do a lot of the picking, even on days our regular Fulfillment TMs are scheduled and working.

 

[Dysprosed]

Don't know how it compares to other stores, but my store has a lot of OPU and SFS orders. If all those OPU orders were shopped the usual way, how many more cashiers would we need? Our front end already suffers terribly from call-offs and they're constantly calling for backup.
Our ETLs and TLs do a lot of the picking, even on days our regular Fulfillment TMs are scheduled and working.

On Saturday, OPU picked 4904 units. Avg. Basket size was 8.93 units. Assuming the average Pickup order is also around 8.93 units, then you could expect about 549 more transactions taking place if those guests shopped in-store vs pickup. Average transaction time was 95 seconds. 549*95=52,155 seconds, or 869.25 minutes. Front lane vs SCO utilization for that day was 33%. 1/3rd of 869.25 = 289.75 minutes, or ~4.83 hours.

If my math checks out, and my assumptions are more or less correct, my store would only have needed 4.83 hours of cashier hours for Saturday to process the equivalent number of instore vs. OPU units. Fulfillment warehouses can have the SFS units. I'd only want to include them if I knew what fraction of our SFS units ships to people in our zip code.

EDIT: I have not performed the above calculation before, and I would love to be challenged on it because it is quite remarkable. I don't know how hours were used by FF and DU on Saturday, but it's a hell of a lot higher than ~5 hours, or even the 14.5 hours that would be needed if assumed 100% frontlane vs SCO utilization..

 

[gracefulfillment]

 

[BackupTL]

I think a giant factor of this reaction from store leadership is stemming from the fact that nobody wants to be "that store who is failing at the pilot". Instead of saying it doesn't work to HQ partners and field, they crack down hard on the store TMs because it's "supposed to work".

If these locations manage to scrape by with the way the pilot is built now, especially metrics wise, the Growth teams will take that as a green light to roll it out when it might actually be disastrous.

 

[FlowTeamChick]

I think a giant factor of this reaction from store leadership is stemming from the fact that nobody wants to be "that store who is failing at the pilot". Instead of saying it doesn't work to HQ partners and field, they crack down hard on the store TMs because it's "supposed to work".

If these locations manage to scrape by with the way the pilot is built now, especially metrics wise, the Growth teams will take that as a green light to roll it out when it might actually be disastrous.

Well, this is stupid but it explains a lot about all the modernization glitches and tweaks. I remember telling our SD (before it was "SD" I think) that I wished the decision-makers would just make up their minds and stop changing everything every other month. It was awful.
Silly me, I'd been thinking that one of the functions of pilot programs was to iron out the problems and fix them BEFORE changes were rolled out to stores. In my younger days, I headed up different things in volunteer roles and would have a debriefing with my committee chairs etc. after the event to figure out what worked, what didn't, and how we could improve things for the next event. There were always things that could be improved and we made changes as needed; we didn't just sort of pretend everything was perfect and insist of keeping everything the same as if it was.
But then, I prefer to live in the real world, not an ivory tower where I'm paid big bucks to play make-believe.

 

[vendordontmesswithme]

I'm aware if only one pilot program that was shut down. Removing the receiver and having f&b team members checking in vendors.

 

[Dysprosed]

I'm aware if only one pilot program that was shut down. Removing the receiver and having f&b team members checking in vendors.

Probably because the vendors complained so much. After all, they have no incentive to pretend like everything is okay.

 

[SigningLady]

I'm aware if only one pilot program that was shut down. Removing the receiver and having f&b team members checking in vendors.

We weren't part of the pilot but our F&B TMs check in vendors about 60% of the time.

 

[idkwhattodo]

Probably because the vendors complained so much. After all, they have no incentive to pretend like everything is okay.

Exactly this. This caused sooooooooo many problems at my store. We were having vendors just leave almost daily and the amount of calls I got at GS from vendors waiting and waiting to be checked in was crazy. Our market isn’t close to receiving plus so many consumables call outs and just general understaffing made this near impossible at my store.

 

[employee 626]

f&b team members checking in vendors

Did they check in ALL vendors? My store has a few that aren't market related that come in. Would a GM/SS TM have to check them in or did it HAVE to be a F&B TM?

 

[moninity]

Who checks in fed ex and ups?

 

[gsa4lyfe]

I'm aware if only one pilot program that was shut down. Removing the receiver and having f&b team members checking in vendors.

This was like two years ago and was one of 6 small pilots. There were 8 variations of the pilots.

 

[vendordontmesswithme]

Did they check in ALL vendors? My store has a few that aren't market related that come in. Would a GM/SS TM have to check them in or did it HAVE to be a F&B TM?

The pilot program was dropped so nobody panic. I wasn't part of the pilot but I'm bet that was one of many issues.

 

[gsa4lyfe]

Did they check in ALL vendors? My store has a few that aren't market related that come in. Would a GM/SS TM have to check them in or did it HAVE to be a F&B TM?

My district did this pilot a couple years ago when it was a thing and I will say it was hit or miss. The biggest issue is a lot of people miss understood the pilot for getting rid of the receiver. This is the first issue. The other issue is stores didn’t have a good routine or receiver going into it so it wasn’t a great baseline.

The actual pilot was “Reverse Logistics Hours reallocation”. The hours reallocation is important here because no where did it say to remove your receiver. This was simply just taking the roles and responsibilities of the receiver and putting clear guidelines and role clarify for who owned what. The hours for F&B vendor management went into the food bucket, the hours for the outbound process stayed in GM with 21 of those hours, 3 hours a day in the receiver bucket for loading the sweeps.

The undefined point of removing your receiver is where it was a little up to interpretation and some stores failed. Our store was successful and saw little to no change and here’s what we did.

Monday-Friday the normal receiver was scheduled under food 6am-12pm and received all vendors like normal. From 12-2:30 this TM was under GM and completed IRs, ESIM and such. They obviously have some downtime in between vendors and would do other random things and sometimes even help with F&B price changes on slow vendor days.

I would then just have an inbound TM load the sweep after the unload and my old receiver would just add to it and seal it up.

They never said to get rid of the person doing the job of receiver just reallocate the hours to show more responsibility as the functions of the job has not changed when modernization did but the leaders who own those areas did so it was an attempt to make that area of the store more clear. You can think of the idea that for most stores your “inbound hours” are only enough to unload the truck so you’ll often see TMs split 4am-6am inbound and then 6am-12pm Gm.

It obviously created more issues than solutions and was scrapped but that’s the beauty of pilots is it’s just trial and error.

 

[Nauzhror]

Bring back the GSAs!

Yes please. Will take back my supervisor numbers and extra pay.

 

[Nauzhror]

Who checks in fed ex and ups?

Usually the fulfillment team at my store.

 

[flow4areasonuno]

Yes please. Will take back my supervisor numbers and extra pay.

They're always in a hurry to teach the new people to do SCO. They want all cashiers to be trained on it. Can't imagine THAT will go poorly at all!