Logistics The Flow/Inbound thread: Until We Yeet Again edition 🤙

I've gotten 12 hours for the last three weeks 😂

And our store is like the biggest in the region. We make bank and they're still cutting hours. It's funny because shit isn't getting done. Yesterday I left 4 pallets of shit on the floor. Shook my head and clocked the fuck out 😎

I just feel bad for the guests. Our store used to look so nice. Now it's an absolute mess. I'd NEVER shop there.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Cooperate,

Is saving some money really worth tarnishing our brand?

Sincerely,

KOI
 
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Today I had to lol because the slowest dude on the flow team has got whalloped with a hideously long succession of 4 hour weeks, which, given that this dude is utterly ON his fuckin phone like he's a NASA engineer getting updates from Mission Control, is not exactly an earth-shaking development. Or rather, I lol'd because he was texting the gf WHILE bitching that he wasn't getting any hours and felt like quitting. I literally said "Bruh they are zooming in on your phone screen with that dome over there and getting an eyeball full of your gf's tiddies and 'mm come home baby im horny xx'" and the deer in the headlights look he gave me was priceless!

This real-life comedy that I get paid to watch is pretty much why I'm still working at Target lmao
 
Wish us luck are flow team is officially going away starting next week.
We well still have a 5 tm+2 receivers on inbound team but the rest of flow,backroom and hardlines well be mixed together and well become the general merchandise team apparently
And were taking a double on Friday
 
can't touch this said:
Still stoked by how small the last few Saturday trucks have been (900ish average)
Click to expand...

Hopefully, the trucks will become mostly filled with freight that will actually go on the floor instead of being 40% backstock. I've said many times that if Target wanted to truly streamline the store logistics process, they need to fix the auto-order system to send freight that will mostly go straight to the shelf. Backstock should really just be upcoming transition product, endcaps that recently came down, upcoming ad/seasonal product that you might want some extra on-hand, and some random bits of eaches that didn't quite fit at the time. The huge amounts we keep on hand of so much other crap is a complete waste of payroll.
 
Backroom81 said:
Hopefully, the trucks will become mostly filled with freight that will actually go on the floor instead of being 40% backstock. I've said many times that if Target wanted to truly streamline the store logistics process, they need to fix the auto-order system to send freight that will mostly go straight to the shelf. Backstock should really just be upcoming transition product, endcaps that recently came down, upcoming ad/seasonal product that you might want some extra on-hand, and some random bits of eaches that didn't quite fit at the time. The huge amounts we keep on hand of so much other crap is a complete waste of payroll.
Click to expand...

Your supporting store sales along with SFS.
 
No I in Team said:
Your supporting store sales along with SFS.
Click to expand...

SFS doesn't even come close to justifying the amount of backstock that we keep at the store level. A 30-40 ft section of light duty shelving of just cereal backstock would get a manager fired at any grocery store that does manual ordering. There's zero reason to be receiving a certain bike from the DC when my store still had an entire pallet left over from the holiday season. The o/h was correct, the floor capacity was correct, it wasn't slotted to be in the ad anytime soon, yet for some reason our replenishment system decided that we needed another one anyways.

I can repeat that little story for literally 100s of DPCIs across the store. The system that determines what gets sent to stores has always been stupid and results in the single biggest waste of payroll at the store level. They could easily make that system smarter and make it to where freight mostly goes straight to the shelf.
 
Backroom81 said:
SFS doesn't even come close to justifying the amount of backstock that we keep at the store level. A 30-40 ft section of light duty shelving of just cereal backstock would get a manager fired at any grocery store that does manual ordering. There's zero reason to be receiving a certain bike from the DC when my store still had an entire pallet left over from the holiday season. The o/h was correct, the floor capacity was correct, it wasn't slotted to be in the ad anytime soon, yet for some reason our replenishment system decided that we needed another one anyways.

I can repeat that little story for literally 100s of DPCIs across the store. The system that determines what gets sent to stores has always been stupid and results in the single biggest waste of payroll at the store level. They could easily make that system smarter and make it to where freight mostly goes straight to the shelf.
Click to expand...

You have several things at work which increase the amount carried within a period of time. You have base minimum amount created when Spot decided to carry the particular merchandise which was just increased recently. Along with this, you have the project maximum sales projection for the company as a whole over time (planned ads and online sales).

Then you have the projected sales cycle itself for the store location and SFS. This along with lead times and product life cycle are what dictates the amount each store will carry.

With SFS in play, the level rises for stores with low projected in store sales as to have product available to ship (capacity). Stores with high projected sales would face product shortages and capacity issues given the amount of product they would have to carry.

I know it does look like they take these things inconsideration, but they do when allocating product. We used to only get one or two furniture items at a time. Now, we get at least three or more beyond floor capacity.
 
Product lead time should only dictate the amount kept at the DCs. Most stores have a truck schedule where as long as product is at the DC, the lead time is only a day or two once the stock drops below the amount necessary for replenishment. It is far more efficient for a pallet of a certain DPCI to be held in storage in 1 spot at the DC and sent out as necessary to the stores than it is to blast dozens of stores with it at once whether they need it or not.

For most product in most stores, it should be as simple as "when o/h drops below max capacity - case size + projected sales until product arrives at store, then ship". For example, a case of deodorant carries 6 eaches and the floor capacity is 12. If I have 12 on hand and sell 4 and the item is forecasted to sell another 2 by the next time I can get it on the truck, then send it. Since we get a truck daily, it's not likely I'm going to sell the other 8 before it comes in. If I was a low volume store, the chance of selling the rest is even lower.

Contrast this with a real life example of our current system. I received 30 bikes of just 1 DPCI during the holiday season. Ok, it's the holidays and it's going in the ad. It's a little ambitious as we've never sold that many of that particular bike before in previous seasons but whatever. Our bike builder makes sure to display them prominently and...only slightly more sales than usual. Than we find out we're the only store in our district to even receive them. A major metroplex and 1 store gets 30 ad bikes and everyone else has to tell prospective buyers to drive to us?

As a result, we sold about half of them and it took the entire following year to sell the rest (while still getting them in from the DC). How many bikes would have been sold if they had allocated the available stock in a way that wasn't stupid? How many people said "screw driving halfway across the city, I'll just get a bike from Wal-Mart instead"?

No I in Team said:
I know it does look like they take these things inconsideration, but they do when allocating product
Click to expand...
After 20 years at Target, I call bullshit on that. I have seen literally hundreds, if not thousands of examples to the contrary.

The absolute worst example I can think of is canned vegetables at my store. One year, we received 4 pallets of assorted canned Del-Monte for the holidays. That by itself is no big deal, it's the holiday season and we can expect to sell those. In the latter half of the season, they kept coming in and replenishing those sales and we still had 3 pallets total by the end of January. That by itself should be no big deal. Using a replenishment system that wasn't retarded, we should be able to make sure our o/h counts stayed up to date and sell through them eventually without further replenishment from the DC. After all, if you have literally 1500 cans of cut green beans in location and the o/h is accurate, obviously the system should take that into account right?

Nope. They kept fucking coming in all year; faster than we could sell them. By the next holiday season, we had 4 pallets of vegetables in location and received another 4 for the holiday allocation. We had tried multiple times to sweep them back but couldn't. Since they came in as palletized assortments, they didn't come with the original plastic wrap that the casepacks do. They came in as loose traypacks arranged on the pallet which was then shrink-wrapped. Since sweeps required all original case packaging, they got sent right back. It took our regional VP showing up and actually looking in the backroom for more than 30 seconds to make it stop.
 
Backroom81 said:
A 30-40 ft section of light duty shelving of just cereal backstock would get a manager fired at any grocery store that does manual ordering.
Click to expand...

Unrelated but I really REALLY miss being able to manually order anything I needed at my old grocery store job. Something out of stock that I want to buy? Easy, I just grab the order gun from the night supervisor, scan what I need to add an extra case to the order, and it comes in the following night for me to pick up after my shift. I was so mad when I got on at Target and found out that it's not a thing here.

My dream job has both the backstock/pull system that Target uses with locations and wacos, plus manual ordering. Why can't we have both?!
 
When I first started at Target, manual ordering in grocery was a thing but it was being whittled away. All of perishables, dairy, frozen, and about half of dry was manually ordered.
 
Backroom81 said:
Product lead time should only dictate the amount kept at the DCs. Most stores have a truck schedule where as long as product is at the DC, the lead time is only a day or two once the stock drops below the amount necessary for replenishment. It is far more efficient for a pallet of a certain DPCI to be held in storage in 1 spot at the DC and sent out as necessary to the stores than it is to blast dozens of stores with it at once whether they need it or not.

For most product in most stores, it should be as simple as "when o/h drops below max capacity - case size + projected sales until product arrives at store, then ship". For example, a case of deodorant carries 6 eaches and the floor capacity is 12. If I have 12 on hand and sell 4 and the item is forecasted to sell another 2 by the next time I can get it on the truck, then send it. Since we get a truck daily, it's not likely I'm going to sell the other 8 before it comes in. If I was a low volume store, the chance of selling the rest is even lower.

Contrast this with a real life example of our current system. I received 30 bikes of just 1 DPCI during the holiday season. Ok, it's the holidays and it's going in the ad. It's a little ambitious as we've never sold that many of that particular bike before in previous seasons but whatever. Our bike builder makes sure to display them prominently and...only slightly more sales than usual. Than we find out we're the only store in our district to even receive them. A major metroplex and 1 store gets 30 ad bikes and everyone else has to tell prospective buyers to drive to us?

As a result, we sold about half of them and it took the entire following year to sell the rest (while still getting them in from the DC). How many bikes would have been sold if they had allocated the available stock in a way that wasn't stupid? How many people said "screw driving halfway across the city, I'll just get a bike from Wal-Mart instead"?


After 20 years at Target, I call bullshit on that. I have seen literally hundreds, if not thousands of examples to the contrary.

The absolute worst example I can think of is canned vegetables at my store. One year, we received 4 pallets of assorted canned Del-Monte for the holidays. That by itself is no big deal, it's the holiday season and we can expect to sell those. In the latter half of the season, they kept coming in and replenishing those sales and we still had 3 pallets total by the end of January. That by itself should be no big deal. Using a replenishment system that wasn't retarded, we should be able to make sure our o/h counts stayed up to date and sell through them eventually without further replenishment from the DC. After all, if you have literally 1500 cans of cut green beans in location and the o/h is accurate, obviously the system should take that into account right?

Nope. They kept fucking coming in all year; faster than we could sell them. By the next holiday season, we had 4 pallets of vegetables in location and received another 4 for the holiday allocation. We had tried multiple times to sweep them back but couldn't. Since they came in as palletized assortments, they didn't come with the original plastic wrap that the casepacks do. They came in as loose traypacks arranged on the pallet which was then shrink-wrapped. Since sweeps required all original case packaging, they got sent right back. It took our regional VP showing up and actually looking in the backroom for more than 30 seconds to make it stop.
Click to expand...


The problem we have at Target is that our Inventory Management System (IMS) does not work nor does it match our current business model. Our DC's are set up to supply the stores in cycles, not as we sell or what is known as JIT. That's why we were set up to maximize case quantities with back stock quantities sufficient enough to cover the turn around time for the next receiving cycle. The only exception are master pack items and broken case quantities. This is where our re-packs come into play.

So the problem we all face is the demand forecast vs. actual sales along with the supply chain life. If the forecast demand tells us that bikes are the hot item, well you know what happens. The window is small and if they don't sell, they don't sell. The supply chain orders and release have dates which the bikes are to be released throughout the supply chain with the last ship dates.

Take for instance our import warehouses and how they are used to buffer quantities so as not to overwhelm the Target Supply Chain prior to transition. Most likely those bikes came in containers and were sorted to according to which DC until they had sufficient quantities to be released or held until the release date. .
Once they meet the requirements to release, they literally start emptying out the Import DC's so they can bring in the next wave of imports sort/hold. The DC's in turn released them to the stores as to what the order quantities stated for the time period of the release to the particular store. Once again, whether we're selling that merchandise or not, it's on the way.

The same thing exist with PFresh and all of its supply chain cycles. It's been ordered and we are all going to accept it.

What we don't see or not made aware of is our sales forecast on individual items per whatever our sales cycle time is for that item. The purchases are made far in advance (about a year or so) and once ordered are coming in whether we're selling it or not. The problem is that we order such large quantities that if you cancel or reduce an order, the unit price goes up substantially or you pay for it whether you take it or not. So to maintain margin we accept the orders like everyone else in retail.

This past year there was a push to move out inventory faster. The problem is that we cannot handle surges like that. There is no buffer area at the store level unless you bring in outside storage.

I'll give you an example of how far off the mark we are currently. Home Depot has NO shelves in their DC's. It is literally a through put operation that distributes all incoming freight to all of the stores that DC serves. Each aisle or bulk location arrives at the store on pallet ready to go to a location. It's all unloaded and rinse and repeat the next cycle. Their process matches their business model. Ours does not.

Other retail DC's that ship JIT are set up to pick pack store orders like a wholesale distribution hub. Ours is not set up for "eaches".

Modernization will never work correctly until we update our IMS and DC's to match our new business model. Canada was "the canary in the coal mine" when it came to how dysfunctional our supply chain model operates. We simply could not recreate it. Why? Because we are not efficient.
 
I agree to a certain extent and that has always been my chief complaint regarding modernization. They should have started by fixing our supply chain operations first. They could have saved a ton of hours at the store level years ago if they had set up a JIT supply system and move on from there.

No I in Team said:
Canada was "the canary in the coal mine" when it came to how dysfunctional our supply chain model operates.
Click to expand...
Target Canada used an entirely different and new replenishment system. It was never properly implemented and was one of the chief failings of the organization. They decided buying some "out-of-the-box" software and using it would be easier than adding metric dimensional fields and French characters to the one we use. Apparently a database field that would do something like Length(mm) = Length(in)*25.4 would have been too damn hard to write.

www.canadianbusiness.com

The Last Days of Target

The untold tale of Target Canada's difficult birth, tough life and brutal death.
www.canadianbusiness.com www.canadianbusiness.com
 

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