MEGATHREAD Flexible Fulfillment
- Thread starter Kaybee988
- Start date
- Replies 11K
- Views 1M
OneArmedJesus
Entertainment DBO
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2018
- Messages
- 1,166
Last year we had a seasonal ship legos in the bag we ship softlines in
Quote for truth.. I have taken to taking my hoodie and tossing it over the top if I have higher dollar or high demand items, cause the SFS carts are not as good as the triple tiers for hiding stuff in..
Doesn't it make you wonder why it states SIOC then? I mean someone somewhere assigned it that.
I've been told multiple times that it's not my job to think, it's my job to do. So you can't have it both ways. Either I follow what I'm told to do or not.
And you can say that obviously you can't ship a pillow like that, but obviously, we shouldn't be blocking the fire tunnels either product either. But here we are.
Came in to the Ship TO store. That huge Lego Ghostbuster set the one is like $400 bucks? Yeah they sent it as a ship alone.. And it came in tore the fuck up.. It was all there but the box is kinda a big deal..
PackAndCry
Furniture, Call Button One
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2017
- Messages
- 1,834
Our STL of all people doesn't use prep bags when he packs softlines, he just balls the items up and puts them in a polybag.
We had a number of those Hearth and Hand aluminium tree skirts go out with the label just stuck to the tree skirt last year since it said SIO.
LearningTree
Guest Experience
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2018
- Messages
- 601
The system may think you're OOS on the floor. Corp figures since you're already back there pulling 1 item for an order, you might as well save time/step and pull enough to fill the floor. So it'll tell you to pull 12, scan 2 for the order, and expects you to take the remaining 10 to the floor.
I personally think this is stupid. While it look reasonable on paper, Flex rarely has time to restock the shelves. At my store they were not allowed to put it with the rest of the pulls and they weren't allowed to put it in reshops. TMs would also throw a fit if they simply tried to hand it to the TM in that section. It got so bad I told my team to just backstock right away what they don't need. I didn't care if it messed up some backroom metric and the Logistics ETL got pissed. They needed to learn how to work as a team.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2018
- Messages
- 3,116
That's shitty. I'd prefer people just hand stuff to me instead of backstocking it. Saves time for both of us.
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2018
- Messages
- 105
We're fucked already.
Our team is scheduled too far apart to even get the primary portion picked. OPU is crazy busy (as usual for Q4), and theres one every 5 minutes. Half of our morning team is on OPU and theres hardly anyone to stay in SFS.
They stopped pulling SFS all together at my store cause four people couldn't keep up with OPU. They left me to finish packing what we had picked, I didn't finish it. It is more important to have the guest traffic in the store than the money from the SFS orders.
I am so mad right now I could spit. And first thing this morning, yep a brand newbie! At least he had a clue. I was so grateful for that. He asked questions and seemed to understand look for things even slow as a newbie was I could leave him alone for a while to pick my batches. The fun part about all this? tomorrow I may have to try and find all those orders that are just sitting and with amount of door busters that I was picking I am going to cancel a lot of orders tomorrow..
I don't know if I will still be working for spot by the end of my shift tomorrow.. I am that angry..
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2018
- Messages
- 68
It says SIOC because the system is imperfect. The same reason it tells me to ship a dress in a 277 - if I lay it flat, that's what it would fit in - but obviously I'm going to fold it. I tell my team to look at the recommended box size, but use common sense. A pack of markers does not need a 280. A pair of shorts is not SIOC.
And for God's sake, YES, it's your job to think. Somebody has to!
I just tell people the system is on crack with a meth chaser and use your brain to pack it right.. I get a laugh and the point is made for the most part.
I was in early for Grey Thursday. We're Low Volume, but still managed about 500 units by 2:30. We didn't have a great system in place and a lot of non-sfs people were scheduled earlier, before any of the regular SFS TMs were. It caused some hiccups. But somehow, with 200 orders at noon, we rounded up about 8-10 people to pick and squeezed it in at the last minute. Sadly, I heard that effort wasn't available for packing. So we missed that metric.
As for BF, I'm anticipating a lot of INF issues and just general guest dodging. I can only image how it's going tonight. I'm in early AM again to likely find a similar amount of orders and even more chaos to handicap it's success.
At least the backroom isn't wall to wall pallets and random debris everywhere... It's now in every aisle on the Salesfloor. 🤦🏻♂️
As for BF, I'm anticipating a lot of INF issues and just general guest dodging. I can only image how it's going tonight. I'm in early AM again to likely find a similar amount of orders and even more chaos to handicap it's success.
At least the backroom isn't wall to wall pallets and random debris everywhere... It's now in every aisle on the Salesfloor. 🤦🏻♂️
SFSFun
Ship from Store: Don't call it Ship To Store!!
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2015
- Messages
- 6,090
Reminds me of the good old days when SFS first started and you had to put a pick label on each item as you were picking, then scan each item into a hold location waco at the end of the batch. And when packing, after you went through the packing steps, you would have to go to the main menu and scan the shipping label again and then another label to "stage" it. All of this using myFA on the PDAs.
I see corporate stole my idea...
Be careful not to embellish it too much if your potential employer will be running a thorough background check. When I applied for my current job, I put my title at Target as "Order Fulfillment Team Member" and the background check company flagged it for manual review because Target reported it as "Fulfillment Team Member."
Amazon also has a thousand different box sizes, with an accurate system that tells the packer the exact right size box to use.
Bonus points if you can figure out what else is wrong with this besides no box.
^^Tear in upper right corner
Shipping label flipped wrong way around(we are told to fold it so it can't be read). I think your is correct.
And they didn't at least tape the damn thing closed..
And Amazon ain't that great with some of the shit I have gotten in boxes.. A thumb drive in a box close to our 438? Yeah no.. T-shirts in bags big enough for me wrap a car in? They ain't perfect..
Shipping label flipped wrong way around(we are told to fold it so it can't be read). I think your is correct.
And they didn't at least tape the damn thing closed..
And Amazon ain't that great with some of the shit I have gotten in boxes.. A thumb drive in a box close to our 438? Yeah no.. T-shirts in bags big enough for me wrap a car in? They ain't perfect..
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2018
- Messages
- 105
They stopped pulling SFS all together at my store cause four people couldn't keep up with OPU. They left me to finish packing what we had picked, I didn't finish it. It is more important to have the guest traffic in the store than the money from the SFS orders.
The fun part about all this? tomorrow I may have to try and find all those orders that are just sitting and with amount of door busters that I was picking I am going to cancel a lot of orders tomorrow..
I don't know if I will still be working for spot by the end of my shift tomorrow.. I am that angry..
We had a stress test that "failed" and only gave us non-Q4 volume. It was a nice idea, but they didn't factor the Q4 OPU into the equation. The test was always a fail from the start. I've read that information they sent to my ETL-LOG. I don't remember the plan mentioning OPU at all. You can't really expect the good pickers to handle OPU and SFS.
Personally, I don't let Corporate's stupid decisions anger me. Whoever stole the 'Try to pick a batch in 30 minutes' from this site is missing the point. You can't really enforce that in OPU, and drop it on SFS. There is no leeway for the people on OPU, not anymore. The unpredictableness of OPU is a bother, and its consistently busy in Q4. I'm not surprised that my store's management didn't account for OPU's volume, after the stress test.
My STL tried to push the team, and I had to stop them with brutal honesty. Schedule us better, and you'll get results. If not, then it is not our problem. Even worse, our ETL-HR would "experiment" with our team's schedule in the past. To no surprise, we've missed deadlines multiple times.
"B-But we scheduled enough of you guys! You guys have more than enough hours!"
Uh, yeah. You split us up, when we work better together, and ignore literally every logical feedback I've thrown at you. Our previous management didn't schedule us terribly, and modernization is drowning our store. Newbies are scheduled to work by themselves without a veteran SFS TM around, and SPOT gave us extra packing
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2017
- Messages
- 60
I honestly don’t know if Amazon really is any better. I have a subscription to deliver the same item (a sparkling juice) every month, and every time it comes in one of three different box sizes, usually with no air pillows, sometimes bubble wrapped.
PackAndCry
Furniture, Call Button One
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2017
- Messages
- 1,834
We almost immediately ditched our SFS tubs in our storage trailer and started using shopping carts when we realized what a disaster area our SFS work stations were trying to use the tubs today.
What I did.. When we found a couple that were not full of truck push or claimed by the OPU peeps..
But the leadership in my store just doesn't fucking get it.. They thought that three or four people could handle it all for SFS/OPU that the OPU people could help SFS when they didn't have anything to do.. Umm how about the 500 SFS orders you knew we were getting, and we told you, we told you District people told you that OPU volume was going to be large. So you schedule four people on Thursday two of them brand fucking new as in their first day!
The flow TL who was running the truck yesterday morning was also so thrilled that you scheduled everyone but the SFS OPU people under flow and then pulled over half his "inbound" people to do projects aka set the store up since there was almost no prep for yesterday. People told scramble and find the end caps product, detrash and get it out!!!!
It was a shit show..
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2014
- Messages
- 859
Anyone know what causes the "Heat Sensor Bad" message on the airspeed machine? We've never had this problem before and now it just happened to the third one within a month.
Last edited:
Oh I agree. But then I get some new abbreviation who makes more than me and says, "Trust the system." Or some other bullshit some desk sitter made up. So you get what you ask for. Don't hire someone, give them little to no training, treat them like shit, then expect them to go against what they've been told.
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2017
- Messages
- 60
Wow. Sorry you had to deal with that. We had extra people help us out all day. But our count was consistently at 2,000 items, it just wouldn’t go down. We had six pickers and four packers and we had to start using three tiers. We also got three people dedicated to OPU the whole night. There was a lot we had to INF that was already taken by guests. Our packers stayed late to finish up all the carts. Our UPS trailer was already half full when I left. I was done at midnight, I can’t imagine what the morning crew is walking into.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2017
- Messages
- 357
In non black Friday mode I use the prep app to audit new TMs and teach TMs to do that for other people, "oh you brought a casepack, do you really need a casepack?" It's helpful for knowing what will be backstock before it gets prepped and given to a packer. But in Black Friday mode with new TMs I wish I didn't have to scan 20 shampoo individually when I find out it is actually needed.
The SAP numbers continue in sequence if you need to order 2X or 3X
At least your people showed up. We hired a bunch of people specifically to start the week of Thanksgiving as cashiers (with previous cashier experience) and SFS some of the SFS were to start the day of Thanksgiving as their first day (It's what corporate funding would allow, as it was we had to cut back core TMs to try to onboard and train early.) So many callouts and NCNS that I think we probably had a good 100 hours of scheduled people not show up between those work centers.
Last edited:
