MEGATHREAD Flexible Fulfillment

[PackAndCry]

That's awful. Does it cause problems for having two packers? It sounds like that would be an issue with having to scan the container to get to the next order.. I guess they'd have to pack separate carts or something?

It's very buggy if you have two people working out of the same cart. It'll try to have them both pack the same order, or will throw one of them to the wrong "scan container to finish packing" screen. We had to use two separate carts.

 

[Kroneru]

Why would they make this change? What positive purpose does it serve outside of dumbing down an easy system for room temperature I.Q. individuals. Splitting collates is a saving grace when you run out of a particular box size, ship diapers alone, and maximize box dimensions in general [avoiding excess air-pillows in negative space]. Plenty of legitimate issues to fix [Ex: pick 4 from upper and the screen is seemingly frozen because it wants 1 for 4 different orders and the only indication is after scanning the first item "scan to cart shp__" appears at the top] but they throw darts at a board of moronic choices.

From Spot's perspective I can see this as a response to stores cheating the system in general and avoidable screw ups. However this shouldn't have been the solution. Hold people accountable, challenge out dead weight, and for the love of shareholders common sense all that is good train your god damn staff.

 

[JohnSith373]

It's a shitshow. You can't split a collate after it's been printed anymore, and it's effectively impossible to stage orders now. But the wave time is gone, which is nice. But Manhattan seems to be broken now.

There's a metric somewhere (might be invisible on the store level) of shipping cost overages that splitting the container affects (since it effectively doubles Spot's shipping cost for the order).

Target must of heard you talking!
If Manhattan is going to be broken, my store will be screwed. Collates don’t always print out or there’s an extra items laying around which makes us investigate. Are you a FedEx, USPS or UPS store?

So, uh, how 'bout Pack and Ship 2.0?

It didn’t seem new at all today during packing but might be a soft rollout. Would we just check under the app version for 2.0? Sometimes I wish we can choose force updates for apps, like the Move app with the ‘for John’ under ‘# needed for order’. I’ve only seen 1 zebra had it and I haven’t seen that version on another zebra.

 

[PackAndCry]

Target must of heard you talking!
If Manhattan is going to be broken, my store will be screwed. Collates don’t always print out or there’s an extra items laying around which makes us investigate. Are you a FedEx, USPS or UPS store?


It didn’t seem new at all today during packing but might be a soft rollout. Would we just check under the app version for 2.0? Sometimes I wish we can choose force updates for apps, like the Move app with the ‘for John’ under ‘# needed for order’. I’ve only seen 1 zebra had it and I haven’t seen that version on another zebra.

It's a totally separate app. Intead of being blue it's gray and has Bullseye above the box, and it's on the last page of apps. We still have both apps but nothing drops into the old app anymore. Items stopped dropping into Manhattan at some point last night, it doesn't seem to work at all anymore and the shipping label looks different now (we're a UPS store) so I'm wondering if Manhattan just isn't used at all on the backend anymore. If the collate doesn't print, there's a "Reprint" option on the "scan container to finish pack" screen that doesn't require the container number to be entered, so I think the "missing collate" thing can't really be an issue anymore, hopefully.

I'm still in shock that this was an actual thing that happened. My face was stuck on "can you believe this shit?" all day.

 

[JohnSith373]

It's a totally separate app. Intead of being blue it's gray and has Bullseye above the box, and it's on the last page of apps. We still have both apps but nothing drops into the old app anymore. Items stopped dropping into Manhattan at some point last night, it doesn't seem to work at all anymore and the shipping label looks different now (we're a UPS store) so I'm wondering if Manhattan just isn't used at all on the backend anymore. If the collate doesn't print, there's a "Reprint" option on the "scan container to finish pack" screen that doesn't require the container number to be entered, so I think the "missing collate" thing can't really be an issue anymore, hopefully.

I'm still in shock that this was an actual thing that happened. My face was stuck on "can you believe this shit?" all day.

I’ll have a look at it tomorrow. If this is a new new rollout, it’s gonna be a bit slower process now with waiting each collate to print. It seems like a way to make us physically pack the item instead of scanning the next order, based on how you describe it.

Target still needs a program that can manifest the weight and the best estimate for a box. They must’ve replaced Manhattan with something only TLs can access. I’ve noticed much of the new systems (Move workload tool, Move replenishment? , myPerformace for OPU) don’t allow TMs to access them. It’s just making us regular TMs work harder every time.

@mobilelady It seems now the ‘relocate items in hold’ has been removed from the PDA. It would’ve been really helpful today when someone scanned a huge item in a waco when it was physically sitting in the backroom. Is the function of ‘relocate items in hold’ being fully tossed or reappearing later on in the zebra?

 

[Thunderbird1956]

That's going to be a huge bottle neck for 4th quarter. We had essentially an assembly line. And the only way it's going to work would be more basket types based on size the same way it's ship and ship alone how about an all softlines cart or an all 126 cart. Have them drop 30 items that all batch based on size or fill group. There are better ways to prevent people from cheating the metric that speed up the process instead of slow it down. The computers take 30 seconds to a min to warm up to print a collate and Q4 they were all running almost constantly.

How about reconciling the packed items with the tracking number upon pickup? You'd only be able to cheat on the weekend if you have a truck. I know UPS allows 25 tracking numbers to be input into the front end in one go. A script that puts all the tracking numbers in to see what's actually been picked up would be more effective than slowing the process down. The deadline would then be the pickup time instead of a hard 4:30 so the only way to cheat would be bribe the courier to come as late as possible, but then you need someone there or you'd have 0 percent fulfillment.

 

[mobilelady]

I’ll have a look at it tomorrow. If this is a new new rollout, it’s gonna be a bit slower process now with waiting each collate to print. It seems like a way to make us physically pack the item instead of scanning the next order, based on how you describe it.

Target still needs a program that can manifest the weight and the best estimate for a box. They must’ve replaced Manhattan with something only TLs can access. I’ve noticed much of the new systems (Move workload tool, Move replenishment? , myPerformace for OPU) don’t allow TMs to access them. It’s just making us regular TMs work harder every time.

@mobilelady It seems now the ‘relocate items in hold’ has been removed from the PDA. It would’ve been really helpful today when someone scanned a huge item in a waco when it was physically sitting in the backroom. Is the function of ‘relocate items in hold’ being fully tossed or reappearing later on in the zebra?

Right now there are no plans to bring back the relocate items in hold functionality. If it becomes a huge pain though for many stores, we'll look at bringing it back but based on the usage reports we ran before we turned it off, most stores rarely or never use it.

 

[Thunderbird1956]

@JohnSith373 @mobilelady probably because TMs didn't know the relocate function existed. I learned it existed through this forum. But in my store people are more likely to write a note and leave it in the Waco than move the item into a new hold location. Anything I can do to avoid tapping the screen on a PDA I'll do.

Side note I'm looking forward to Ship To Store getting off the PDA. It can easily take over 2 min per box just based on how responsive the screens are, and since the PDAs are getting phased out nobody including me wants to send a PDA in for repair. I think we're up to 6 broken PDAs at this point. Good news is most of the store is in MyDevices. The bad news is most of the store is on MyDevices and we just had to send 5 in for repairs. That's after sending 4 in last month.

 

[PackAndCry]

At my store we tend to just leave a note in the waco or physically move the waco. Since the way that putting items in the hold location sort of encourages you to not make sure everything fits first (since you'd have to just take it out to scan it all or type all the DPCIs and probably influence some invisible metric), it happens more than you'd think. I think it also depends on how individual stores have the hold locations set up (some seem to just use shelves and not wacos so they wouldn't have as much of an issue with that).

Is printing labels for OPUs instead of handwriting them ever coming back?

 

[Thunderbird1956]

It's very buggy if you have two people working out of the same cart.

We technically have 6 listed pack stations but only 4 printers, it's the same for the other enhanced stores I know about. When we had a SFS walk we were told they weren't going to do anything to upgrade us but we would need power outlets and networking for printers or else people would be walking over to the printer after each pack.

 

[PackAndCry]

Yeah, thankfully our non-working printer at our main pack station was fixed before the rollout, so I guess somebody knew it was going to happen.

I really wish Pack and Ship 2.0 knew about polybags and that softlines-only orders shouldn't be boxed. We had a TL help pack who had been putting them all in boxes because that's what the app said to do.

 

[OneArmedJesus]

Checked and we don't have that yet

 

[Kroneru]

We had a TL help pack who had been putting them all in boxes because that's what the app said to do.

We had someone who helped pack that didn't use air pillows nor protect items with bubble wrap [machine was on her station and full roll directly above her empty head] because "nobody told me to use them". Common sense -100. I'll assume they never ordered anything online, witnessed the opening of a package, or was just plain malicious because calling people stupid is too easy. I need some variety in my insults.

 

[Thunderbird1956]

Collates don’t always print out or there’s an extra items laying around which makes us investigate.

There are two main reasons for this issue, one is someone scanned the cart and the screen said one or more collates have not waved and the TM chooses to print anyway. The other reason is you print all the orders to a single printer and the buffer for the printer gets overloaded. Both options can be fixed both through software fixes or through training.

The other issue is splitting collates and collates printing twice. Once at the requested station and once at the default printer.

Software wise don't allow printing to occur until everything has waved. I can't think of a reason to have allowed printing before everything as waved to even be an option. If you were down to the wire and wanted to print what you had then clean up the rest to try to get close to the metric, then just allow that to be an option 20 min before the deadline, but even doing that encourages cheating to achieve the metric. Also give me a cancelled item sheet so I can know what's actual backstock and who over picked.

 

[JohnSith373]

There are two main reasons for this issue, one is someone scanned the cart and the screen said one or more collates have not waved and the TM chooses to print anyway. The other reason is you print all the orders to a single printer and the buffer for the printer gets overloaded. Both options can be fixed both through software fixes or through training.

Looks like my store doesn’t have pack and ship 2.0 yet.
We only have a single printer so it seems we can’t fix the buffer head issue. There was one batch with 3 Ship Alone orders but only 2 collates printed out. We don’t know why but we just go with it.

 

[PackAndCry]

We had someone who helped pack that didn't use air pillows nor protect items with bubble wrap [machine was on her station and full roll directly above her empty head] because "nobody told me to use them". Common sense -100. I'll assume they never ordered anything online, witnessed the opening of a package, or was just plain malicious because calling people stupid is too easy. I need some variety in my insults.

We have that "Ship From Store" poster that is hung up in our packing area that explains air pillows, liquids, LI stickers, and HZ stickers, and I point to it every time someone asks me about those things but it never seems to sink in.

Thankful the RDID button has been added to ePick. Give my props to the team (hopefully they fix the issue I found with it)

Please tell me this means what I think it means.

 

[PackAndCry]

It probably is.
I believe we're the only store with it at the moment, but if an item is RFID enabled, a little blue antenna looking button appears to the top right of the picture. If you tap it, it opens up an overlay on top of move with the RFID locate screen. No need to toggle to the app or type in the DPCI. It will also ask you to choose which scanner if your device is paired with multiple.

If you hit the back arrow, the overlay disappears and brings you right back to your batch.

This needs to be rolled out immediately to every store. My god, this would save so much time. So would a "open in myWork" button, but omg this will save SO MUCH TIME.

 

[Kroneru]

We have that "Ship From Store" poster that is hung up in our packing area that explains air pillows, liquids, LI stickers, and HZ stickers, and I point to it every time someone asks me about those things but it never seems to sink in.

I personally mounted ours to the wall. Might as well be a fly on sticky paper.

 

[mobilelady]

Thankful the RDID button has been added to ePick. Give my props to the team (hopefully they fix the issue I found with it)

The issue for the locate function not working when navigating from ePick...that'll be fixed tomorrow for pilot stores.

 

[tgtJose]

It probably is.
I believe we're the only store with it at the moment, but if an item is RFID enabled, a little blue antenna looking button appears to the top right of the picture. If you tap it, it opens up an overlay on top of move with the RFID locate screen. No need to toggle to the app or type in the DPCI. It will also ask you to choose which scanner if your device is paired with multiple.

If you hit the back arrow, the overlay disappears and brings you right back to your batch.

My store has that as well. But it only seems to be there for softlines items, and not rfid-enabled bed/bath/domestics items.

Definitely super helpful and a huge improvement over doing it with the old ipod mydevices, when it would take 5 minutes just to pull it up.

 

[REDcardJJ]

Is printing labels for OPUs instead of handwriting them ever coming back?

you can still do it manually in myFA using a PDA

 

[hufflepuff]

Collates are down, apparently globally. So now we're already behind for the day. Again. And the hourly report isnt working again. This has been so great lately.

 

[slowhands]

Tried force printing a collate thru manhatten and it worked. Really don't want to do that for all of them......

 

[hufflepuff]

Tried force printing a collate thru manhatten and it worked. Really don't want to do that for all of them......

Last time I checked ours weren't even waving to be able to force print

 

[PackAndCry]

Thankfully this doesn't affect stores on Pack and Ship 2.0 since Manhattan isn't a thing anymore for us.