Put Priority Pulls on steroids

Z

Zorro

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Jun 25, 2024
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Empty shelves are lost sales imo. The current problem is (my store anyway) not enough time is spent to zone, adjust floor counts for product (especially when the spot is empty and the system says it has product), and pull/push out of stock items. I strongly suggest it may be wise to have a TM start early in the am pulling & pushing out of stock items only. Is it more important to have all locations have some product or many locations be fully stocked while many locations are empty with product in the back room ?? I say if we have the product fill the holes early and often. A TM should be pulling out of stock all day and half the night. Use the hours spent on Priority Pulls to do this method instead. I have seen it increase sales for a department over the course of just a couple months in my store (yes by me yes without permission). I just made it part of my routine as DBO, it did not keep me from pushing my freight or doing other tasks. A small step reaped big rewards (% wise). Not apologizing for that.

Priority Pulls are so 2022. I have some affection for the PP for reasons I won't state but whomever was wise enough to put PP's in place I hope you act on this quickly. My wife has moved on to the Wmart because they have full shelves and a clean store now. She is your target (pun) guest, middle class likes to decorate has disposable income. You lost her! She used to literally make a face if I suggested going to Wmart. They have changed. And so have we.
Maximize the productivity of the TM doing pulls, fill holes on the floor all day, reduce other TM's flexing product into the out of stock location, reduce the amount of pulled product being rebackstocked because the numbers were off for the floor on hand qty, etc.
If anyone can add some comments to support doing this please do.
Priority Pulls was a fine idea but I think I see a better way. Am I right ?
 
If priority pulls are being done regularly, there shouldn't be enough out of stocks to have to be pulled all day long. Items in priority pulls drop in when an item sells 30% or more of the SFQ compared to the SFC. Ignoring the priority pulls to only focus on out of stocks would create more out of stocks. Priority pulls are in place to keep the floor from becoming empty.

If your store has out of stocks with items located in the back, that sounds more like an issue with the freight not being worked out correctly. Or perhaps the TMs pulling priorities aren't pulling the OOS batch first, then the rest of the priority to ensure they fill those empty spaces. There's definitely an opportunity for a seek to understand here, but getting additional payroll for what you suggest is never going to be an option (despite it making the most logical sense). Retail logic doesn't work that way.
 
Not asking for much more hours wise since my method replaces the PP puller hours and since just doing OOS takes less time than PP the TM pulling can spend time correcting things or be used for another task or then do some priority pulls for certain departments. Right now with the speed that things are selling (Black Friday sales stuff) pulling/pushing OOS must be done constantly or sales are lost. last Sunday we had 36 OOS for seasonal alone at 2pm which is when our PP TMs just start pulling but they just stage the pulls so product does not get pushed until much later (but in time for the next day ?!) That is not good.

"Priority pulls are in place to keep the floor from becoming empty." the intent of Priority Pulls was and is to reduce the amount of time spent pulling/pushing with the added plus of less instances of pulling X qty of an item then finding you pulled more than enough for the location and having to re-backstock what you just pulled. It is a more efficient use of TM hours than doing a regular pull.

This new method reduces pull time even more while emphasizing keeping floor locations stocked. It is typically the larger higher priced items that fit 1-2 each to a location as well as popular items (sale items) that will become OOS during the day. The method will practically eliminate having to restock any items you pull.

This time of year it is more important than ever to keep locations stocked. With limited hours to use which method gets the most needed product out on the floor ? The new method, Priority Pulls on Steroids (still trying to figure a good name for it) is the answer imo.

Thanks for contributing SigningLady you are one of the best!
 
SigningLady said:
Also, no TM should be flexing any empty locations- it's not best practice. SFC and SFQ should be validated while backstocking to ensure items do not come back out in a pull for locations that are full. Sounds like some retraining is in order.
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They can easily fix this by getting rid of SFC and SFQ. If an item is removed from the floor from any channel, add it to the pull. You literally do not need this weird asf quantity and capacity system for all the pull system to do is just subtract the two numbers... Pulls would be more accurate AND be smaller. Because there is no chance for an item to come out again if its not needed.
 
SFC and SFQ are a checks and balances. Heaven forbid something somewhere in the process breaks down (a mispick, a box sent to a wrong store, a TM doesn't stock dual locations, a casepack gets lost below the line for a week, a barcode for the red deer in this ornament assortment isn't tied to the dpci, a guest put something back in the wrong spot, a TM flexed something, item is stolen, cashier rings out two different products as the same, etc.), the capacity and quantity allow for a quick and easy way for the system itself to catch a multitude of possible errors (in addition to reliably working as intended 95+% of the time) so that the humans involved can fill in the remaining gaps.

I'd much rather accidently pull something unecessary because of a SFQ/SFC snafu (and immediately be able to fix the issue), than to never be prompted to pull it and never even know there's an issue to begin with, with a product dying in the backroom
 
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My store could never seem to answer this.

At what percentage of capacity does the system make an item a priority pull?

Is it 70%, 80%, 90%, etc.

We would end up pulling items that were at 90% capacity constantly.

It would have helped it you could sort DCPI by it's percentage of capacity.

I did pull my OOS first though.
 
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Mikuhl said:
They can easily fix this by getting rid of SFC and SFQ. If an item is removed from the floor from any channel, add it to the pull. You literally do not need this weird asf quantity and capacity system for all the pull system to do is just subtract the two numbers... Pulls would be more accurate AND be smaller. Because there is no chance for an item to come out again if its not needed.
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we will have to agree to disagree.

My area runs like clock work using the current SFC and SFQ. The worst is during a reset, and sometimes the Capacities are insane, but a quick fix has them back to normal.

I wish HQ would set a cap on capacities. Does 1300 units as an SFC sound right? no. 🙄
 
jenna said:
we will have to agree to disagree.

My area runs like clock work using the current SFC and SFQ. The worst is during a reset, and sometimes the Capacities are insane, but a quick fix has them back to normal.

I wish HQ would set a cap on capacities. Does 1300 units as an SFC sound right? no. 🙄
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I wish HQ would set a cap on capacities. Does 1300 units as an SFC sound right? no.

What item NEEDS a capacity more than 99 anyway?

Produce maybe?

Even our cans are soup are usually no more than 60 or so even if it is on an end cap.
 
Mikuhl said:
They can easily fix this by getting rid of SFC and SFQ. If an item is removed from the floor from any channel, add it to the pull. You literally do not need this weird asf quantity and capacity system for all the pull system to do is just subtract the two numbers... Pulls would be more accurate AND be smaller. Because there is no chance for an item to come out again if its not needed.
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Are you familiar with the Inventory Ledger? The number of inventory states for any item is actually significantly greater than what are shown to Target TMs, as many as nine (cap, sfq, ulq, trq, brq, ctq, hdq, aoh, toh), which all have different use cases, which aren't necessarily for the store user . Getting rid of SFQ is not feasible without a complete redesign.
 
The SFQ/BRQ system is fine. What doesn't make sense to me is that the system doesn't create audits based on what this data is showing. If Item A has a SFQ of 12, a BRQ of 16, and an OH of 8 then the system should be flagging this as apart of the daily audits. I understand most of them are based on INFs from fulfillment leading to a loss of sales, but audits the other direction will help find on hands that are clearly low (or have massive BR data issues) which will lead to less backstock in the long run.
 
BKop16 said:
The SFQ/BRQ system is fine. What doesn't make sense to me is that the system doesn't create audits based on what this data is showing. If Item A has a SFQ of 12, a BRQ of 16, and an OH of 8 then the system should be flagging this as apart of the daily audits. I understand most of them are based on INFs from fulfillment leading to a loss of sales, but audits the other direction will help find on hands that are clearly low (or have massive BR data issues) which will lead to less backstock in the long run.
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It doesn't produce Audits because audits create labor costs, and it can quickly balloon out of control if left unchecked. It needs to be limited to the most value added tasks.

There is a team at HQ called IIA. Inventory Insights and Acquisition. They have a decent number of models that produce AICs (automatic inventory corrections). These models generally outperform people, without the associated cost. But their models have filters in place to prevent corrections of an insufficient confidence threshold to be made. This is a good thing, since there isn't a human to independently verify. At any rate, the number of times I've seen people who should know better making inaccurate inventory adjustments
 
BKop16 said:
The SFQ/BRQ system is fine. What doesn't make sense to me is that the system doesn't create audits based on what this data is showing. If Item A has a SFQ of 12, a BRQ of 16, and an OH of 8 then the system should be flagging this as apart of the daily audits. I understand most of them are based on INFs from fulfillment leading to a loss of sales, but audits the other direction will help find on hands that are clearly low (or have massive BR data issues) which will lead to less backstock in the long run.
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That use to be the case about 5 years ago . Backroom opener had to do first thing in the am
 
BKop16 said:
The SFQ/BRQ system is fine. What doesn't make sense to me is that the system doesn't create audits based on what this data is showing. If Item A has a SFQ of 12, a BRQ of 16, and an OH of 8 then the system should be flagging this as apart of the daily audits. I understand most of them are based on INFs from fulfillment leading to a loss of sales, but audits the other direction will help find on hands that are clearly low (or have massive BR data issues) which will lead to less backstock in the long run.
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On another note, I have created my own report that assess every item in the store with a BRQ greater than its OH value. I use that to create my own manual list of items to go and audit. It's extremely useful for reducing excess inventory and fixing data discrepancies.
 
Dysprosed said:
On another note, I have created my own report that assess every item in the store with a BRQ greater than its OH value. I use that to create my own manual list of items to go and audit. It's extremely useful for reducing excess inventory and fixing data discrepancies.
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Me too. I even added SFQ to do SFQ + BRQ = OH. It's great for finding low on hands but also low SFCs and SFQs that are too high preventing pulls from dropping in.
 

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