Archived The Big & Dandy Backroom thread!

[mammoth]

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?!?!

you most likely had a my device that, for some reason, was not updated. There is one at my store that only has the ad/all option. just borrow someone else's and drop it.

 

[SFSFun]

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

We pull the areas that Flow will be hitting first. So generally dry market/chem/pets/paper/hba. Right now we have 1 person start off with toys since there is already a team over there on the sales floor.

I think the TM who pulls market will pull seasonal after.

If the autofills are taking 4 hours to actually pull them, the solution is to have more TMs pulling.

 

[CrimsonRaven712]

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.

We only had two people pulling yesterday, and then most days we only have 2 people pulling for the first two hours and then add another. This usually works fine during the rest of the year but 4th quarter pulls are larger so we don't have enough people to do the pulls

We pull the areas that Flow will be hitting first. So generally dry market/chem/pets/paper/hba. Right now we have 1 person start off with toys since there is already a team over there on the sales floor.
/QUOTE]

Thats the way we try to do it, because they tend not to send people back to push seasonal until after A/B are done. Since we are having a truck everyday pulls tend not to get touched until the truck is done and by that time most people are gone for the night. Most of our flow team only stays for 4hrs.

 

[ReneP]

Hello everyone, I'm looking for any advice to help. Here is where I am at, I am a low volume store. I have 3 aisles of toys. 1 toy 1, 1 toy 2, 1 toy 3. I am getting slammed with toys I'm sure everyone else is, but right now I'm just running out of space for all the toys and all the seasonal. On top of my etl and stl barking at me that I have to come clean. So I started to use my shoe aisle, I don't get a lot of shoe backstock, that aisle is getting full now. Now when I walk the floor there is a lot of ties that are not set. So a lot of freight that flows in, doesn't go out. any advice would help let me know thanks everyone

 

[SrTLall]

Hello everyone, I'm looking for any advice to help. Here is where I am at, I am a low volume store. I have 3 aisles of toys. 1 toy 1, 1 toy 2, 1 toy 3. I am getting slammed with toys I'm sure everyone else is, but right now I'm just running out of space for all the toys and all the seasonal. On top of my etl and stl barking at me that I have to come 2clean. So I started to use my shoe aisle, I don't get a lot of shoe backstock, that aisle is getting full now. Now when I walk the floor there is a lot of ties that are not set. So a lot of freight that flows in, doesn't go out. any advice would help let me know thanks everyone

When you say you have 3 aisles do you mean both sides of one aisle or just half an aisle?

We have an entire aisle (both sides) for Toy 2, and another aisle for Toy 1 and 3. Both of these aisles have sections A-T. That's probably the minimum you want to have in order to run effectively throughout the year. Seasonal 1,2,3 are also down an A-T aisle. HCDY is half an A-J aisle.

It's probably too late to adjust this, but down all your toy aisles, you want 1 shelf for lower, 1 shelf for open stock, 2 shelves for wacos, 1 more shelf for open stock, then the rest upper. This should allow you to get all open stock toys down your toy aisles.

With all of that full, we have condensed half a HOME aisle for Trim overflow and have 2 sections in SHOE being used for Trim. Toy casepacks are being overflowed to the top 2 shelves in lower # aisles so they will pull first, causing less reorganization later. Ultimately, you want to use any space available for toy casepacks, just be strategic and group them together.

In addition to all of that, hopefully your store has a dedicated toy team that helps with flexing, maintaining endcaps, and shooting outs/lows every day you take a truck. Furthermore, you want your instocks TM to spend at least an hour each shift maintaining seasonal then shooting lows/outs there.

While our store is doing all of that, we still have 2 pallets of seasonal backstock and 1 pallet of mini backstock on the line which we will be reworking on our next truck.

 

[SFSFun]

Hello everyone, I'm looking for any advice to help. Here is where I am at, I am a low volume store. I have 3 aisles of toys. 1 toy 1, 1 toy 2, 1 toy 3. I am getting slammed with toys I'm sure everyone else is, but right now I'm just running out of space for all the toys and all the seasonal. On top of my etl and stl barking at me that I have to come clean. So I started to use my shoe aisle, I don't get a lot of shoe backstock, that aisle is getting full now. Now when I walk the floor there is a lot of ties that are not set. So a lot of freight that flows in, doesn't go out. any advice would help let me know thanks everyone

We start putting very large open stock items in upper case locations as needed and then case stock flows into upper locations of nearby aisles. Our shoes aisle is also packed, so for now they've still been cramming everything into the existing toy aisles (total of 2.5 aisles with sections from A to T).

 

[ReneP]

Thanks for the tip guys. My toys are toy 1 and 2 are on the same aisle and my toy 3 is on the next aisle but it only takes one side

 

[Firefox]

Anyone else dealing with insane 3 o'clock CAF times for the past few days? On Thursday they were over 8.5 hours, and we barely managed to get them done on time thanks to the help of two ETLs and 1 SFS TM that came to help out. Then yesterday, we apparently had 7 hour long CAFs.

Also, does anyone know if the due time is still 9AM for SPUs that drop in after 11pm? Because the goal time now shows up as one hour after it dropped in like a normal SPU.

 

[Lazy]

Also, does anyone know if the due time is still 9AM for SPUs that drop in after 11pm? Because the goal time now shows up as one hour after it dropped in like a normal SPU.

Yes they are. It was changed like 3-4 months ago in order to know which one to prioritize when picking in the morning.

 

[Firefox]

Yes they are. It was changed like 3-4 months ago in order to know which one to prioritize when picking in the morning.

Interesting, I'll have to pass that along to my BRTL because he wasn't sure either. Typically our backroom closers are only in until 11, so I havent' seen any SPUs that have dropped in past 11pm until just yesterday

 

[SFSFun]

Anyone else dealing with insane 3 o'clock CAF times for the past few days? On Thursday they were over 8.5 hours, and we barely managed to get them done on time thanks to the help of two ETLs and 1 SFS TM that came to help out. Then yesterday, we apparently had 7 hour long CAFs.

Yes they've been 5-7 hours each day. I stayed late every day this week for SFS and almost every day I had to jump in and help pull for an hour.

Also, does anyone know if the due time is still 9AM for SPUs that drop in after 11pm? Because the goal time now shows up as one hour after it dropped in like a normal SPU.

The due time is one hour after the store opens for any that drop later than one hour before the store closes. Even though it shows that it's due within an hour, myPerformance takes your store's hours into account and won't count those as late.

It's still a weird sight logging into redwire every morning and seeing a bunch of missed goal SPUs though.

 

[anathema]

Was there an actual reason for changing goal times for past store close? Only thing I saw them reference was something about time zones...

 

[SFSFun]

I thought I remembered seeing something about it making it easier for when stores have extended hours (this change occurred in the summer when some stores were open later and some were testing 7am openings).

It definitely helped us on Thanksgiving/BF.

 

[Firefox]

So we've been getting double after double after double. Tonight will be the third night of back to back doubles, and it sounds like we'll be taking at least 12 trucks/week until Christmas. Please, have mercy.

 

[Lazy]

Was there an actual reason for changing goal times for past store close? Only thing I saw them reference was something about time zones...

To show priority when picking them in the morning. But it didn't really matter since usually in the morning who ever is picking will open all of them and not do them one by one as corporate envisions

 

[SFSFun]

So we've been getting double after double after double. Tonight will be the third night of back to back doubles, and it sounds like we'll be taking at least 12 trucks/week until Christmas. Please, have mercy.

Wow that's going to suck. We're taking 4 doubles next week, but we can only take trucks on 5 days due to availability and not having enough flow TMs to spread out over more days. It works out great for the flow team since they can get it done in 8 hours and most of them still have two days off. But the BR keeps getting hammered with 1200+ pieces of backstock, and it's hard for the 4-5 person team to handle.

 

[SrTLall]

So we've been getting double after double after double. Tonight will be the third night of back to back doubles, and it sounds like we'll be taking at least 12 trucks/week until Christmas. Please, have mercy.

No mercy in sight. I know 'In With the New' starts rolling in next week, which means lots of plastics and paper, hope you have space in your bulk stockroom . I think BUCK comes next week as well. Make sure whoever does pre-ties in your store doesn't forget they start again next week (I think) or else youll have an even larger cluster fuck.

 

[Bosch]

No mercy in sight. I know 'In With the New' starts rolling in next week, which means lots of plastics and paper, hope you have space in your bulk stockroom . I think BUCK comes next week as well. Make sure whoever does pre-ties in your store doesn't forget they start again next week (I think) or else youll have an even larger cluster fuck.

Our steel is full of toys and all the of the three containers worth seasonal that we got dumped with no room to put it. We are down to just two containers of un-located seasonal and only 8 pallets toys un-located that we are working out. Which is now floating on just about every tub in the store.

 

[Firefox]

I will say though, I'm surprised with how well our Backroom has managed to stay afloat during this holiday season. Last year it was a complete shit-show, but this year both overnight and dayside are hauling ass and getting it all done. There are definitely days where we don't come clean, but most of the time that's taken care of within the next day and we don't have a situation where we're snowballing out of control like last year. On the majority of my closing shifts, we come completely clean and leave no backstock for overnight and on most of my morning shifts we are done backstocking freight by 9-10am.

The real disaster this year has been Ship from Store, but that sounds pretty universal.

 

[Logo]

We've also done a pretty good job at coming clean. I think part is due to losing some of our longer term tm to other jobs/moving/quitting. It was a blessing and a curse. The team we have now actually works as a team!

 

[CrimsonRaven712]

We aren't doing the best in my store. We haven't come clean in weeks, mostly because we don't have the people. Anyone extra has been stuck of SFS. We also have so much toy backstock that we have filled our 3 toy valleys completely and spread into the tops of 5 other valleys. Pulling is a pain now because we get in the way of other people working on their batches.

 

[Rdhdstpchl]

Pulling autofills can be a real pain when the backstock has already filled every nook and cranny.

 

[SFSFun]

It now takes at least an hour for two people to pull toys every morning, and that's not even counting the time it takes to stack the casepacks onto pallets.

A single TM was stuck pulling toys on Saturday morning and I had to help after he accidentally blocked himself in the TOY2 aisle due to the huge pile of boxes he'd thrown down.

 

[Firefox]

Speaking of toys, on Wednesday night last week I pulled about 3.5 pallets worth of Toy's Price Change. Almost entirely TOY2.

 

[Shadowski]

While the br here is bad with pallets of toys sticking around, I have my team push and repush toys every day. It's made a huge difference, and overall I think things are better then last year. I was br the last 2 seasons and this looks the best