Archived The Big & Dandy Backroom thread!

[Firefox]

A quick question for my follow BRTM's, I pulled the autofill this morning for Electronics; I added it to the 3 o'clock pulls from Saturday (plus five Research, and EXF batches). I put the three-tier cart by the Electronics boat for the 7am pushers, but by 11am the pull wasn't pushed and the pushers went home; I asked them about it. They said that Flow Sr. TL told them that Electronics TM would do the pull that morning. The Electronics TM refused to do the pull and her 2 pm replacement also refused to do the pull, and that the Flow team would finish it on Monday morning; with my luck I'll end up pushing it. I'm going to bring this issue up with the Flow Sr. TL, ETL Log, and the STL; mainly because this is what happened last year where the Electronics TM's refused to push any pull during 4th Quarter, and I ended up pushing days’ worth of pulls to the floor. Are Electronics TM reasonable for pushing their pulls or is someone else?

The answer to your question is gonna vary a lot based on store (and especially store volume). I'm in a fairly large store so we are an overnight process, so flow pushes all of the autofills. Typically, if overnight leaves push or backstock left over we are told to leave it and focus on dayside pulls/backstock first. Overnight pulls generally will not get pushed at all by dayside at my store.

 

[Grizzlies]

Typically the Flow TM would do the autofill on the truck days; the Electronics TM does it on non-truck days since we only 2 pushers on non-truck days. If the Auto is heavy the backroom will help with the push. As for volume, we switched to the 6am unload last year.

 

[Kompa]

The electronic TM is supposed to push autofills. Out flow electronic guy sometimes pulls them but they are left for the electronic tm

 

[ElectronicsTM]

A quick question for my follow BRTM's, I pulled the autofill this morning for Electronics; I added it to the 3 o'clock pulls from Saturday (plus five Research, and EXF batches). I put the three-tier cart by the Electronics boat for the 7am pushers, but by 11am the pull wasn't pushed and the pushers went home; I asked them about it. They said that Flow Sr. TL told them that Electronics TM would do the pull that morning. The Electronics TM refused to do the pull and her 2 pm replacement also refused to do the pull, and that the Flow team would finish it on Monday morning; with my luck I'll end up pushing it. I'm going to bring this issue up with the Flow Sr. TL, ETL Log, and the STL; mainly because this is what happened last year where the Electronics TM's refused to push any pull during 4th Quarter, and I ended up pushing days’ worth of pulls to the floor. Are Electronics TM reasonable for pushing their pulls or is someone else?

Electronics team members should be the individuals responsible for pushing electronics pulls regardless of what time of the year it is. They are trained specifically to handle merchandise protection and should know the department better than anyone.

If anything, they should want to handle those pulls since they can control the on-floor inventory and make sure things are pushed right the first time.

Me personally, I loved doing pulls during fourth quarter and requested manuals every day. I might ask for help near Christmas, but I made sure it got done. I dropped and pulled manuals throughout this year and often so hopefully their first manual won't be massive.

 

[Hardlinesmaster]

A quick question for my follow BRTM's, I pulled the autofill this morning for Electronics; I added it to the 3 o'clock pulls from Saturday (plus five Research, and EXF batches). I put the three-tier cart by the Electronics boat for the 7am pushers, but by 11am the pull wasn't pushed and the pushers went home; I asked them about it. They said that Flow Sr. TL told them that Electronics TM would do the pull that morning. The Electronics TM refused to do the pull and her 2 pm replacement also refused to do the pull, and that the Flow team would finish it on Monday morning; with my luck I'll end up pushing it. I'm going to bring this issue up with the Flow Sr. TL, ETL Log, and the STL; mainly because this is what happened last year where the Electronics TM's refused to push any pull during 4th Quarter, and I ended up pushing days’ worth of pulls to the floor. Are Electronics TM reasonable for pushing their pulls or is someone else?

My electronics folks pushes the auto fill, at my store. Those lazy bums.

 

[SFSFun]

We have the Elec Flow TM push the autofill on truck days. If there is a pull that was skipped from the day before, we will either leave it in the stockroom and add the 3s to it or we will push it out to the boat and line it up with the reshoot carts.

The autofill on non-truck days typically sits in front of the boat until 1 or 2pm since there is no morning coverage.

 

[Firefox]

Has anyone had any troubles with myFA not showing details when you press the "Item Info" button while picking an SPU? For a few hours during my shift today, it would just say something along the lines of "Info cannot be found" and the picture would just be a gray box.

 

[SFSFun]

Has anyone had any troubles with myFA not showing details when you press the "Item Info" button while picking an SPU? For a few hours during my shift today, it would just say something along the lines of "Info cannot be found" and the picture would just be a gray box.

Very occasionally it will do it on one item. Maybe once or twice it did it consistently for all items. I just had to guess, or grab a myDevice and type in the DPCI on the Target.com app.

 

[oath2order]

A monument

 

[Firefox]

How does backroom typically work on Thanksgiving day? We're opening at 6pm this year, but I'm scheduled the 6pm-1am shift so I'm going to try to show up half an hour early. Any advice on what I should expect?

 

[CrimsonRaven712]

How does backroom typically work on Thanksgiving day? We're opening at 6pm this year, but I'm scheduled the 6pm-1am shift so I'm going to try to show up half an hour early. Any advice on what I should expect?

There are a few things you might be doing. Here is a list of things that I've done in the past on Thursday/Friday
-Pull manuals
-Pull Flexibles (this is a freaking pain trying to dodge people on the floor)
-grabbing items for SF people who come back looking for items that are out.
-Pushing pulls. (also a nightmare)
-backstock anything extra that might come back from manuals you pull.

 

[Kompa]

How does backroom typically work on Thanksgiving day? We're opening at 6pm this year, but I'm scheduled the 6pm-1am shift so I'm going to try to show up half an hour early. Any advice on what I should expect?

You'll be shitting yourself with flexes.

I'm in at 12pm. Six hours before we even open lmao

 

[SFSFun]

How does backroom typically work on Thanksgiving day? We're opening at 6pm this year, but I'm scheduled the 6pm-1am shift so I'm going to try to show up half an hour early. Any advice on what I should expect?

Your store will probably take a truck or two later in the night, so there will be autofills and backstock from the unload to deal with. Last year it was mostly just misc guest pulls, refilling stuff on the floor, pulling exfs, etc. until the truck unload.

I think we have one or two TMs doing 4pm-12:30am BR (then coming back at 8am on Friday), and the rest of them are doing 4am-12:30pm SFS and then 10pm-8:30am BR.

 

[Firefox]

Thanks for the heads up. I was hoping to have an 8-4:30pm SFS shift, but that didn't end up happening I suppose. This'll be my third Black Friday with Target, but it's my first in Logistics so we'll see how it compares to working the front lanes.

 

[Noiinteam]

Thanks for the heads up. I was hoping to have an 8-4:30pm SFS shift, but that didn't end up happening I suppose. This'll be my third Black Friday with Target, but it's my first in Logistics so we'll see how it compares to working the front lanes.

Anything is better than working the front lanes!

 

[Bosch]

The electronic TM is supposed to push autofills. Out flow electronic guy sometimes pulls them but they are left for the electronic tm

My store would have a shitfit if overnight didn't push there pulls. One thing if they are behind(double truck) or a new release set. But anything from the truck or autos that overnight pulled, they own that crap.

Bad enough we have to fix what they screw up

Your store may differ.

But pulls should not be sitting around for days. At that point if it sits 24hrs at my store it gets backstocked.

 

[callmetaylor]

All of a sudden I've started seeing like 3-5 new faces in the backroom. I was never introduced to any of them. Never told we were getting BRTMs...they just appeared.

Sounds like none of the other regular BRTMs were let in the loop either, which means most of these people were inadequately trained.

One of the newbies was pulling a batch, had a vehicle parked on the end of the backroom and after every.single.item. walked the length of the backroom to put it on the flat. ...like...what?!?

I thought I was dumb when it took me a week or two to start taking tubs down aisles with me- but this TM was walking each item to a totally different room (it was across the fire tunnel)


God help us all. Our BRLA is going to be horrific. I cannot fathom why so many people have just been turned loose in the backroom. I understand that the TLs/ETLs/STL are privy to more info than we are and therefor may have different priorities, but there are so many things that they're letting slide right now that blow my mind.

 

[mrknownothing]

All of a sudden I've started seeing like 3-5 new faces in the backroom. I was never introduced to any of them. Never told we were getting BRTMs...they just appeared.

Sounds like none of the other regular BRTMs were let in the loop either, which means most of these people were inadequately trained.

One of the newbies was pulling a batch, had a vehicle parked on the end of the backroom and after every.single.item. walked the length of the backroom to put it on the flat. ...like...what?!?

I thought I was dumb when it took me a week or two to start taking tubs down aisles with me- but this TM was walking each item to a totally different room (it was across the fire tunnel)


God help us all. Our BRLA is going to be horrific. I cannot fathom why so many people have just been turned loose in the backroom. I understand that the TLs/ETLs/STL are privy to more info than we are and therefor may have different priorities, but there are so many things that they're letting slide right now that blow my mind.

Wow. Good luck. I still do the back-and-forth thing sometimes when I'm pulling batches, but I'm getting better about it.

My TL refused to hire seasonal TMs for the backroom. She wanted to get us as many hours as possible and fill in the gaps with cross-trained TMs from other workcenters. We did end up taking in a couple transfers, but our hours are still decent now that payroll is finally starting to be less shitty.

 

[SrTLall]

Why the hell are there 6 fill options for dropping manual CAFs and not one for fill to capacity? I keep selecting the 'Fill for depth' option because it pulls the most and it seems like the system will only pull a maximum of 3 eaches for an individual DPCI.

I'd like to be able to go through a fillgroup once to purge the back and fill the floor to capacity - am I doing something wrong, is there a way to do this that I'm missing?

 

[CabbageKnight]

My Backroom currently has only three Full Time Employee's including myself, No Team Leader, No Seasonal's, And our ETL is focused on SFS. But we did surprisingly well today, For the 1 O'Clock pulls we ended up getting them done in about Twenty Minutes, And for the 3's when I left at 4:30 they were doing alright. (The problem batches were Toys and Electronics, With all three Toy groups being 300+ items.) It wasn't fantastic, But we did well. We had no Backstock and no POG's or EXF's in the Gun. Its been hard without a TL for a few Months and an ETL who doesn't pay attention to the Backroom, But we're doing really well, I've been pulling Eleven Hour shifts all Week to make sure everyone gets home on time and I've been thanking them for everything they've done, And thus far this Month we've actually managed to keep overtime to below 10 Hours. The remained of Q4 is going to be a pain, But I think with the Team we have in Backroom, We can do it and come out relatively alright.

 

[Firefox]

Electronics made up 4 of the top 5 largest batches today during the 3 o'clocks and the estimated pull time clocking in around 6 hours. However, the LOD had the bright idea of pulling 3 of our 5 total BRTM's to do other things leaving myself and one other TM to pull the entire 6 hour CAFs. I protested and told the LOD that there is no chance that we could each pull 3 hours of CAFs each in 1.5 hours, especially because we were still responsible for getting guest pulls. The LOD was the ETL-GE, and he actually said to me "So what if you guys miss? It's fine." Like, what? Just because they aren't your metrics, that doesn't mean that they don't matter or that you can actively sabotage our pull time. I just don't understand it. They didn't even get pulled for anything important, one was pulled to audit the SPU hold locations, one was taken to help SFS (which already had 9 TMs and didn't need any more), and the last was taken and told to update the CHEM aisle. Really? You're going to do this on Black Friday during the 3 o'clock CAFs?

Against all odds though, we hauled ass and actually came pretty close to getting them done on time. Only off by about 5-10 minutes. After the CAFs were done though, the rest of the night was a cakewalk. I was actually able to do some Empty Location Audits in, which I haven't been able to squeeze in during an evening shift in a long while.

 

[SrTLall]

Why the hell are there 6 fill options for dropping manual CAFs and not one for fill to capacity? I keep selecting the 'Fill for depth' option because it pulls the most and it seems like the system will only pull a maximum of 3 eaches for an individual DPCI.

I'd like to be able to go through a fillgroup once to purge the back and fill the floor to capacity - am I doing something wrong, is there a way to do this that I'm missing?

Nice, I created some manuals this morning, and instead of the usual 6 useless options, my only 2 options were 'Ad' and 'All'! They also pulled to capacity. Is anyone seeing any direction/communication regarding manual CAFs that I haven't received?!?!

 

[asidius]

I had to work the backroom on a sore knee yesterday. Even with the STL's help, I didn't complete the 3 PM CAFS until 7 pm. I'm sure I'll hear about it again from my TL when the CAF timeliness metric gets dinged on Mon/Tues but I told her the day before that I should be put on light duty instead of pulling CAFs.

 

[CrimsonRaven712]

To everyone who does the morning autofills, do you try to pull the biggest ones first or try to get a bunch of the smaller ones out first? I've been told in the past to leave the biggest pull (currently seasonal) until last and just knock out the small ones. I overheard a Flow TM complaining about how we waited until last to pull seasonal and that there was no one really left to push it.

Now I kinda understand where he was coming from, but at the same time I think it is better to just have one pull left to push instead of about 40. For example between our Toy and Seasonal pulls today, those took about 4 hours So that means we would have had over 50 pulls left by the time most of the Flow team and a few of the BR people were scheduled to leave

 

[SrTLall]

To everyone who does the morning autofills, do you try to pull the biggest ones first or try to get a bunch of the smaller ones out first? I've been told in the past to leave the biggest pull (currently seasonal) until last and just knock out the small ones. I overheard a Flow TM complaining about how we waited until last to pull seasonal and that there was no one really left to push it.

Now I kinda understand where he was coming from, but at the same time I think it is better to just have one pull left to push instead of about 40. For example between our Toy and Seasonal pulls today, those took about 4 hours So that means we would have had over 50 pulls left by the time most of the Flow team and a few of the BR people were scheduled to leave

Depends on the day/what's going on in your store. If your store is taking a truck, you want to pull in the order they push, which during 4th quarter should be toys first, then seasonal.

If at any point you are not able to complete pulling the autos before the pushers leave, then you don't have nearly enough people pulling or you aren't moving fast enough.