MEGATHREAD Flexible Fulfillment

Firefox said:
So today was a shitshow for all involved. I was initially scheduled as Backroom from 9a-5pm, but as soon as I get in my BRTL tells me that I'll be doing SFS all day. No problem, that's cool. Till I see that we have 52 batches in the gun. WTF. Probably around 15 are SA, while the remaining 37 are full 25 item batches and we only had 4 people scheduled today. So me and one other BRTM are picking as fast as humanly possible, along with the other 3 FFTMs and the FFTL. When I had a full 3 tier after about 3 batches, I went to our packing area to tie down the cart and get a new one as they had a fair number of large items. I saw that our FFTL (who I will call Jordan) and one veteran FFTM (who I will call Kevin) are there, and they're clearly stressed out about this giant workload. I'm still questioning if this really happened or not, several hours after the fact, but all of a sudden Jordan just starts fucking screaming at Kevin about something innocuous like picking the wrong item or something. After about a minute into his tirade, he just says "Fuck it! I'm done, fuck you, and fuck this place." and walks out, but not before throwing his PDA in the general direction of the equipment cage. I didn't see anything happen to his walkie, so he might have just walked out with it for all I know.

I just kinda stood there is shock, but Kevin doesn't miss a beat and calls out over the walkie "So hey guys, Jordan just quit. Don't worry too much about it, let's knock these batches out." I stood there for another ten seconds or so, before I hesitantly went back to work. Compared to that, the rest of the shift was fairly boring, but in the end we got all the batches pick and almost everything packed and roughly a half of the packed orders onto the trailer.

Now the whole team is just kinda clueless as to how to proceed. I guess for now our BRTL will be taking over most of the Flexible Fulfillment ordering, or he'll pass that on to the veteran FFTM to handle. I'm guessing that they'll put one of the more veteran FFTMs into the now vacant TL spot. And of course, since this happened on a Friday, we'll be shorthanded over the weekend. It's gonna be interesting the next couple of weeks.
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Wow I wish I was there to see this... Jordan was probably stressed out from the huge workload. ... did you guys look up how many orders you had that day? I never seen ours go over 37 batches except 4th quarter. .. kinda tired of everyone ordering paper towels and chemicals tho
 
H2Owned said:
Wow I wish I was there to see this... Jordan was probably stressed out from the huge workload. ... did you guys look up how many orders you had that day? I never seen ours go over 37 batches except 4th quarter. .. kinda tired of everyone ordering paper towels and chemicals tho
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I didn't have the time to check. I think what happened was that we had a super light pre-10am amount of orders drop Yesterday, so the majority of the orders that dropped yesterday were due today. I also talked to my ETL-OPS about it, and apparently we haven't been getting our full order load until yesterday, so we were staffed fairly lightly. Combine the two and you get mayhem. Sprinkle some UPS bullshit and dealing with a sea of SA batches on top, and you get a freaked out TL.
 
@Firefox

Was the FFTL an outside hire? I don't get how a TL could come into this and not know what to expect or how to handle it if things get tough.

4 TMs at 300 orders is not nearly enough though. We have 2 for 100 orders and are barely keeping up due to this weeks ad.
 
SFSFun said:
@Firefox

Was the FFTL an outside hire? I don't get how a TL could come into this and not know what to expect or how to handle it if things get tough.

4 TMs at 300 orders is not nearly enough though. We have 2 for 100 orders and are barely keeping up due to this weeks ad.
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Absolutely. I'm not certain, but I think he was an outside hire. I didn't pay attention to anything Flexible Fulfillment related when we got started it.
 
Firefox said:
Absolutely. I'm not certain, but I think he was an outside hire. I didn't pay attention to anything Flexible Fulfillment related when we got started it.
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Yeah but having worked at Target, you would know to expect that TLs will not always have the tools and resources to execute a job properly.
 
SFSFun said:
@Firefox

Was the FFTL an outside hire? I don't get how a TL could come into this and not know what to expect or how to handle it if things get tough.

4 TMs at 300 orders is not nearly enough though. We have 2 for 100 orders and are barely keeping up due to this weeks ad.
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You are right it definitely isn't enough... the sad part is my store cheats the system by picking all the batches and then scan all the items out in all the carts so they can beat the 4:00 deadline. The problem is they leave freaking 20 something carts for the closer to pack in 6 hours... I always get it down to 9 but last week sale messed everything up.... instead of packing the carts left from overnight the morning team jumps into picking... but anyways long story short corporate called and figured out why orders they said were packed but UPS never recieved... so I'm definitely interested in seeing what happens now
 
H2Owned said:
You are right it definitely isn't enough... the sad part is my store cheats the system by picking all the batches and then scan all the items out in all the carts so they can beat the 4:00 deadline. The problem is they leave freaking 20 something carts for the closer to pack in 6 hours... I always get it down to 9 but last week sale messed everything up.... instead of packing the carts left from overnight the morning team jumps into picking... but anyways long story short corporate called and figured out why orders they said were packed but UPS never recieved... so I'm definitely interested in seeing what happens now
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That's definitely not cool. What's your order cap at right now? We stopped scheduling a closer/overnight shift when fourth quarter ended and our order count dropped down to 300.
 
H2Owned said:
It's still under 300 usually between 250 to 280
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Interesting. Because on most days we are able to come clean or close to it by the 4:00 deadline without scanning out all of the carts. We do that for SIO items, but we usually have one person working on pairing SIO collates with the correct items while everyone else packs. And that's without someone evening/overnight picking or packing the due tomorrow orders.
 
Firefox said:
Interesting. Because on most days we are able to come clean or close to it by the 4:00 deadline without scanning out all of the carts. We do that for SIO items, but we usually have one person working on pairing SIO collates with the correct items while everyone else packs. And that's without someone evening/overnight picking or packing the due tomorrow orders.
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Yeah the problem is our TL isn't really there to run esfs... since the flow tl is on loa the FFTL is busy running the flow team.. so no leadership running it and the new ETL Logistics doesn't care about it either...then you also have people moving slow... so right now it is just a snowball rolling downhill getting bigger and bigger...
 
H2Owned said:
You are right it definitely isn't enough... the sad part is my store cheats the system by picking all the batches and then scan all the items out in all the carts so they can beat the 4:00 deadline. The problem is they leave freaking 20 something carts for the closer to pack in 6 hours... I always get it down to 9 but last week sale messed everything up.... instead of packing the carts left from overnight the morning team jumps into picking... but anyways long story short corporate called and figured out why orders they said were packed but UPS never recieved... so I'm definitely interested in seeing what happens now
Click to expand...
Has anyone been asking TLs/ETLs/STL for more help getting caught up? When we were at 500 orders during 4th quarter, that's pretty much what it took to stay on top of it (although they didn't actually listen until after we got our call from corporate).

Once our LOG and STL learned to trust us when we asked for help, we were always able to have TMs from other workcenters jump in until things got caught up again. You should never get to the point when you are consistently fake packing orders because it just snowballs from there.
 
tgtJose said:
Has anyone been asking TLs/ETLs/STL for more help getting caught up? When we were at 500 orders during 4th quarter, that's pretty much what it took to stay on top of it (although they didn't actually listen until after we got our call from corporate).

Once our LOG and STL learned to trust us when we asked for help, we were always able to have TMs from other workcenters jump in until things got caught up again. You should never get to the point when you are consistently fake packing orders because it just snowballs from there.
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Psh the only ETL that helps pack is our new ETL HR b/c she wanted to learn how the system works. All the other ETLs just help scan everything out. I will admit they send 1 or 2 cashiers back to help us but I feel like that really doesn't help
 
tgtJose said:
Has anyone been asking TLs/ETLs/STL for more help getting caught up? When we were at 500 orders during 4th quarter, that's pretty much what it took to stay on top of it (although they didn't actually listen until after we got our call from corporate).

Once our LOG and STL learned to trust us when we asked for help, we were always able to have TMs from other workcenters jump in until things got caught up again. You should never get to the point when you are consistently fake packing orders because it just snowballs from there.
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We did. It took a visit to get actual help, they didn't want to help us out.
 
So I guess one benefit of this new CAF schedule is that I'm getting more hours in Flexible Fulfillment. For the next two weeks, 16 of my 24 or so hours are SFS, and it'll be a welcome break from the constant Backroom shifts I've been getting.
 
Worked SFS yesterday. Filled an order for 11 glass vases. That thin glass that cracks really easy from the remodeled home area in B and C.

And then it's shipping to New York... from Indiana.... xD

I packaged the hell out of that one. Each vase in bubble wrap, space filler bags, and put it all in an over sized box to be sure. Sometimes, man.... sometimes.... 🙂

A few orders later, I shipped 2 big bottles of detergent and a jar of Mayo. Looked it for a moment and wondered if they were trying to troll me. Solution was to double bag the mayo, gripper tape and bag the chem, then put the mayo in a little 125 box inside the larger ox for the order. Looking back I should have split it maybe, but yeah... it's quite separated. 😀
 
Shadowski said:
Worked SFS yesterday. Filled an order for 11 glass vases. That thin glass that cracks really easy from the remodeled home area in B and C.

And then it's shipping to New York... from Indiana.... xD

I packaged the hell out of that one. Each vase in bubble wrap, space filler bags, and put it all in an over sized box to be sure. Sometimes, man.... sometimes.... 🙂

A few orders later, I shipped 2 big bottles of detergent and a jar of Mayo. Looked it for a moment and wondered if they were trying to troll me. Solution was to double bag the mayo, gripper tape and bag the chem, then put the mayo in a little 125 box inside the larger ox for the order. Looking back I should have split it maybe, but yeah... it's quite separated. 😀
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I wouldn't have bothered with the 125, that's just a waste of materials. The mayo would have been fine with just the double ESIM bag haha.
 

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