Archived Can someone settle the debate of STO/SUBT backstocking?

[The Dude Abides]

Anonymous12345 It doesn't cause errors period. My team tested it one week and we intentionally overused SUBT9999 to see if it would affect location accuracy. We came back over 99.5% like always.

If someone is using it on truck push/ challenge that hasn't been reworked then they are just causing more problems.

 

[Anonymous12345]

Konk: Anything after the 12s should mostly go out because it is all based off sales at that point, unless you were backstocking some items after the 12s. How big are your 12s??

StackerMistress: I'm not saying everything should be SUBT9999 and it should only be used if the TM is 100% sure it's legit backstock. The instock item search trick works really well to audit backstock too, especially if it only has one sales floor location. How big are your 12s??

TheDudeAbides: I'm not sold on that answer. I'm not saying you're wrong but I'm going to test it out to make sure. I know that I read on WB that the proper way to use it is with STO 1st but if you are right then that way would save a lot of time. We will see. How big are your 12s??

 

[The Dude Abides]

In the past my 12s were an abomination, but like I said other than that one week we only use SUBT9999 on POG/Revision/Sales Planner backstock or on repushed challenge, so if any thing else had any issues they would still come up after being STO'd.

My store has CAFS that are a bit different now. It only drops certain fillgroups during each hour instead of pulling to the need every hour, but in exchange the individual batches are much larger.

 

[sigma7]

The good thing about stoing first is that it catches MIR items and clearance, but you will not create errors if you don't. Errors can only be created/logged when pulling batches. What you can do to test this theory and you are hesitant to create errors all over your Backroom is to create a z location. Subt9999 several items into it and then LOCU it (or conversely just hit yes when it asks if you pulled all from that location. Then during the next week, pull the BRLA report and see if you have errors in the z location, which should only be the location you created since you shouldn't have any ungrounded locations to begin with.

 

[Anonymous12345]

Yes, I would test it out with a z location but I would also use a rare fill group like LIQR or jewelry and do it maybe 3 times with different items and then check that department on the BRLA the following week and see if there is 3 errors. I'll let you know once I find out, and yes you are right STO is a good filter to catch if it's CLR or MIR.

 

[Backroom81]

Yes, I would test it out with a z location but I would also use a rare fill group like LIQR or jewelry and do it maybe 3 times with different items and then check that department on the BRLA the following week and see if there is 3 errors. I'll let you know once I find out, and yes you are right STO is a good filter to catch if it's CLR or MIR.

Someone on here tested SUBT999 with LIQR before and found it to have no impact on the BRLA report. I will echo that SUBT 999 is fine when used intelligently. Personally, I only use it on post-transition backstock, endcap changes, and TnT backstock. Standard truck backstock and CAF backstock is done with STO.

My store has CAFS that are a bit different now. It only drops certain fillgroups during each hour instead of pulling to the need every hour, but in exchange the individual batches are much larger.

I would kill to have that. Pulling a few large batches is far more efficient than doing several tiny ones. It's for that reason I miss the old CAF schedule of 1, 3, and 5.

 

[Anonymous12345]

Yes, when pulls were every 2 hours it was much more efficient. But I kind of like the Project Viper model were there is no automated pulls and you have TMs own every department of the store day and night. I really think this could work and I think they should pilot it at more stores not just 4 stores.

 

[Backroom81]

But I kind of like the Project Viper model were there is no automated pulls and you have TMs own every department of the store day and night. I really think this could work and I think they should pilot it at more stores not just 4 stores.

CAF pulls were only implemented around 12-13 years ago, before that the only automated pull was the overnight autofill. TMs were supposed to utilize RSCH and EXC (old version of EXF but same function) to maintain the shelves during the day. CAF pulls were created because that didn't work. TMs didn't have the time to do that between backing up the front lanes, reshop, zoning, etc. and stores had MUCH more payroll to spend and a lot more TL positions existed as well.

I don't see Viper working on a large scale at all. I especially don't see it working at a high volume store during the holiday season.

 

[Anonymous12345]

As far as heard so far it is working at those select stores piloting it. But in order for it to work you have to have a TM assigned to every area, morning and night. So were talking about 13-25 TMs depending on volume. A TM could handle it because they are only focusing on let's say pets/chemicals instead of 2-3 blocks. You would likely need to eliminate your backroom, instock, and maybe price change team and combine them all onto the sales floor. But we won't know until they pilot more stores.

 

[Backroom81]

As far as heard so far it is working at those select stores piloting it. But in order for it to work you have to have a TM assigned to every area, morning and night. So were talking about 13-25 TMs depending on volume. A TM could handle it because they are only focusing on let's say pets/chemicals instead of 2-3 blocks. You would likely need to eliminate your backroom, instock, and maybe price change team and combine them all onto the sales floor. But we won't know until they pilot more stores.

What volume are the stores piloting it? What type of stores are they? What is their payroll usage like compared to stores of similar volumes? Those are very important questions I have not seen answered here. Others include:

How has their backroom metrics changed with the elimination of the backroom team and having every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the sales floor suddenly waltzing in the backroom to do their own pulls?

How well are they handling equipment since now EVERYONE needs a PDA instead of just backroom/instocks.

Do they actually do the above or do they just have a couple of people scan the outs/lows on the floor while others handle the pulling in the back for everything while the remainder that couldn't get PDAs cover the backup/sales floor calls? (as in, almost what we do now)

Without a backroom team, who does other backroom tasks such as MIRs, sweeps, price change pulls, POG pulls for transitions, quantity audit batches, MMB scanback, or even basic maintenance like replacing shelving and wacos? Who takes ownership of the backroom for that matter?


My doubts spring from the fact that VIPER isn't too different from how things were handled prior to the implementation of CAFs. Sales floor used to have to scan their own lows/outs on a daily basis and then fill it after backroom pulled the batches. This was during a time when a lot more payroll was allocated to stores and it failed bad enough that the CAF system was created to address the issue. I really hope they keep this under a microscope throughout the holiday season. 4 stores out of ~1700 is way too small of a sample size to see how this would work company wide.

 

[konk]

Konk: How big are your 12s??

I can't speak for truck days, but on weekends it's usually 30-40 fill groups and takes me about 55 minutes.

 

[keynesian]

Without a backroom team, who does other backroom tasks such as MIRs, sweeps, price change pulls, POG pulls for transitions, quantity audit batches, MMB scanback, or even basic maintenance like replacing shelving and wacos? Who takes ownership of the backroom for that matter?

I'm not sure how it is in other regions, but MIRs and sweeps are reverse logistics out here, price change pulls are the backroom closer, pog pulls are pulled by the pog team, quantity audit batches are the backroom team lead, mmb scanback is electronics, and NOBODY replaces shelving or wacos - EVER! other than the CAFs our backroom day people only ever pull PTMs, Price Change, EXF, and research, and sometimes they backstock.

 

[Backroom81]

Our backroom day does all of those. I don't remember the last time I saw the reverse logistics TM do anything that took her outside of receiving. Pog team has never pulled their own batches at my store despite the fact that they are supposed too. MMB scanback got dumped on us 5 years ago. Both our day and o/n BRTLs keep up with maintenance (well, kinda).

 

[tgtguy]

So, I hate reading this entire thread but here is the facts.....

If you are talking about rebackstocking anything that is pulled during the autos or cafs process by STO'ing and then SUBT 9999 and ReSTO'ing. You are talking about what Anonymous12345 just discussed above and the other guy that he quoted..... Kinda...

ONE EXAMPLE IS, STO/SUBT9999/STO is a bandaid on a problem on the sales floor that needs to be trouble shooted. A perfect example is when a Sales Planner is tied (not set) and a POG fill is not dropped. If the sales planner isn't set/tied and filled properly, the system will automatically generate pulls to fill the floor because accumulator has been increased (to much for this post).

At the end of the day, you need to let the ETL-LOG/ETL-Replen and the ETL-HL or whom ever owns plano. This process can be screwed up by a ton of people but most of the time it is LOG (double locations), Plano (fake ties), and Backroom (underpull, batch burning, and shady caf pushers).

Let me know if you have any more detailed questions.

Thx,

Once again...there is a flaw in the system. ...instead of leadership realizing this they just like to play the blame game. ETL, DTL, they all know about this....and have for years.

 

[Bosch]

I just backstock how the lead(who knows what is going in vs ETL or TL) wants me to do. STO or SubT whichever what they need.

 

[The Dude Abides]

My store has CAFS that are a bit different now. It only drops certain fillgroups during each hour instead of pulling to the need every hour, but in exchange the individual batches are much larger.

I would kill to have that. Pulling a few large batches is far more efficient than doing several tiny ones. It's for that reason I miss the old CAF schedule of 1, 3, and 5.

It works better for the most part because pull vehicles are much more well organized, but this time of year the hour that drops office is just insane. The office batch alone is running between 75-90 DPCIs and has an estimated pull time of over an hour. That hour also drops STAT, PLAS and BPLS (along with another 8-10 small batches) which are also heavy pulls during back to school time. The result is the hour that drops has an estimated pull time of nearly 2 hours and we have one person who is expected to pull and push all of that.

 

[Rock Lobster]

As far as heard so far it is working at those select stores piloting it. But in order for it to work you have to have a TM assigned to every area, morning and night. So were talking about 13-25 TMs depending on volume. A TM could handle it because they are only focusing on let's say pets/chemicals instead of 2-3 blocks. You would likely need to eliminate your backroom, instock, and maybe price change team and combine them all onto the sales floor. But we won't know until they pilot more stores.

The thing is it is supported by MyTime in this sense. Scheduling the Salesfloor when the guests are here (instead of based on task) means your TMs will be present in the areas exactly when they are forecasted for sales. You do not need to schedule that many TMs all day, the idea is you schedule as many TMs as possible to fit the sales your store is doing. So from 3-7 you should see the MOST team members, and they should be continually zoning and scanning the areas.

 

[The Dude Abides]

As far as heard so far it is working at those select stores piloting it. But in order for it to work you have to have a TM assigned to every area, morning and night. So were talking about 13-25 TMs depending on volume. A TM could handle it because they are only focusing on let's say pets/chemicals instead of 2-3 blocks. You would likely need to eliminate your backroom, instock, and maybe price change team and combine them all onto the sales floor. But we won't know until they pilot more stores.

The thing is it is supported by MyTime in this sense. Scheduling the Salesfloor when the guests are here (instead of based on task) means your TMs will be present in the areas exactly when they are forecasted for sales. You do not need to schedule that many TMs all day, the idea is you schedule as many TMs as possible to fit the sales your store is doing. So from 3-7 you should see the MOST team members, and they should be continually zoning and scanning the areas.

Which would all be nice if the front lanes were properly supported by MyTime. Since they are not those Project Viper TMs will spend most of their shift backing up the lanes and will not be able to accomplish anything in their areas.

 

[Guest]

I'm just not going to use SUBT999 to back stock with STO anymore. Way more work and time wasted. As long as I watch what I back stock and maybe pace myself, I won't pull back that much. Today, I only back stocked with STO and didn't have that much problems. I honestly didn't have that much time to back stock since the CAF pulls were pretty big and flexible fullfilments popping up every hour.

 

[Rock Lobster]

As far as heard so far it is working at those select stores piloting it. But in order for it to work you have to have a TM assigned to every area, morning and night. So were talking about 13-25 TMs depending on volume. A TM could handle it because they are only focusing on let's say pets/chemicals instead of 2-3 blocks. You would likely need to eliminate your backroom, instock, and maybe price change team and combine them all onto the sales floor. But we won't know until they pilot more stores.

The thing is it is supported by MyTime in this sense. Scheduling the Salesfloor when the guests are here (instead of based on task) means your TMs will be present in the areas exactly when they are forecasted for sales. You do not need to schedule that many TMs all day, the idea is you schedule as many TMs as possible to fit the sales your store is doing. So from 3-7 you should see the MOST team members, and they should be continually zoning and scanning the areas.

Which would all be nice if the front lanes were properly supported by MyTime. Since they are not those Project Viper TMs will spend most of their shift backing up the lanes and will not be able to accomplish anything in their areas.

Well MyTime will be. Next week rolled out the fix for Front End hour allocation. It has been changed from a workcenter in which can be flexible to one that is rigid. There is a certain amount of transactions and sales that are taking place every 15 minutes, and you get the exact amount of cashiers for those. They can no longer be cut! MyTime also has put a focus on mid cashiers, and will purposely leave only 1 cashier at the end of the night to overstaff in the middle (when we will be zoning/scanning/reshop).

 

[The Dude Abides]

Cool, what happens when you only have one cashier all day like at my store? We don't have "extra hours" from the night to give to the end of the day.

 

[Rock Lobster]

I do not know. It is uniform across the company now. The STL cannot change the hour allocation so therefore every dollar made = certain amount of cashier payroll. It is the same for all of us starting next week and we cannot steal hours from the front end anymore. We started getting as many hours as we used to in MAX but it is more overstaffed from 12-6:30ish.

 

[Anonymous12345]

As far as heard so far it is working at those select stores piloting it. But in order for it to work you have to have a TM assigned to every area, morning and night. So were talking about 13-25 TMs depending on volume. A TM could handle it because they are only focusing on let's say pets/chemicals instead of 2-3 blocks. You would likely need to eliminate your backroom, instock, and maybe price change team and combine them all onto the sales floor. But we won't know until they pilot more stores.

The thing is it is supported by MyTime in this sense. Scheduling the Salesfloor when the guests are here (instead of based on task) means your TMs will be present in the areas exactly when they are forecasted for sales. You do not need to schedule that many TMs all day, the idea is you schedule as many TMs as possible to fit the sales your store is doing. So from 3-7 you should see the MOST team members, and they should be continually zoning and scanning the areas.

I don't believe they use mytime for the sales floor schedule, maybe the rest of the work centers though. They basically schedule an opener and closer with a 7 hour shift in every department and mids on the weekends. It's all on workbench if you want to check it out, it lays everything out in detail. I believe the system we have now is flawed and we should try something different in my opinion and we won't really know if this works until more stores try it.

 

[mrknownothing]

I do not know. It is uniform across the company now. The STL cannot change the hour allocation so therefore every dollar made = certain amount of cashier payroll. It is the same for all of us starting next week and we cannot steal hours from the front end anymore. We started getting as many hours as we used to in MAX but it is more overstaffed from 12-6:30ish.

Fantastic. Now I won't have to back-up cash because I won't be scheduled in the first place due to lack of sales floor hours.

 

[sigma7]

/offtopic

Looking at the dashboard, open shifts that I'm given in consumables, and the schedule that it generates for the store (save for parts of the cashiering schedule), it seems like myTime should work. I've told you all before how my STL reallocates payroll to logistics before schedule generation and then totally reallocates payroll after schedule generation. We get a printout of hours that don't match the dashboard at all. Logistics gets even more hours while sales floor hours get slashed across the board. It's totally ridiculous. myTime can work. It wants to give hours to guest driven workcenters. Stores need to suffer through the first couple of weeks to a month of the rollout. The stores in my district that stuck with it through the hard times are seeing benefits to their store. They're at the point now where they're contacting other stores to see if TMs want extra hours because they now have extra hours to fill and are struggling to find quality hires. And their trucks are getting done. And their service scores are green. And their zone is good.

My store didn't even work with myTime for a week before my STL started this whole "let's not use myTime" game. It makes writing the schedule a nightmare since you can't use open shifts and you have to cut anywhere from 100-200 hours out of major sales floor workcenters (hardlines, softlines, consumables). Nothing is getting done at my store. Sales and POG don't have enough hours to keep up with transitions and salesplanners because flow and backroom are netting an extra 300-400 hours per week. Which would be fine if they were coming clean and helping out in other areas of the store (or even just coming clean), but they are perpetually a truck behind. They don't even finish a 1600. We're a 4am process.

Moral of the story, myTime can make your store successful if you let it work, but you have to hold process teams to their allocated payroll. You can not have slackers on any of your teams, but your logistics process has to be on point for myTime to work. So that means your logistics TLs and ETL(s) have to manage performance (along with every other TL and ETL in the store in their respective departments).