Keynesian: On-hands and capacities are off but I wouldn't say by enormous amounts. That probably means your in-stock team is excessively zeroing counts w/o checking untied endcaps and checking the backroom for un located product. And yes there can be mis-picks but I bet if you have contests for mispicks, your team will bring it to your attention more often.
NiceGuy: Can you explain why when you backstock Plano backstock from a new set and it's legit backstock, why does it trigger in the 12pm CAF?? What is someone doing wrong to make that happen? Because this happens every time like clock work if SUBT9999 is not used. I'm pretty sure it because of what Sigma7 said on p.1. The accumulator is flawed, I wish it would base it more off on-hand and capacity. And when backstock it should just prompt for every item it thinks can go out but if the team member overrides it, it shouldn't pull in the next CAF, plain and simple and you shouldn't have to use SUBT9999.
But I'm know Target HQ knows the accumulator system is flawed and their looking for ways to improve it but it will take time to implement such dramatic changes.
There is some human error involved too, like overstocking, EXFs, count changes, capacities , etc. but there are things that aren't.
If the accumulator issue was fixed I'm sure it would save 2-5 hours per store and multiply that by 1700, that's a lot of saved payroll.
So the plano thing I can talk about specifically, though somebody tangentially mentioned this earlier. Two things happen when you do the sales floor tie, obviously you change the schematics, aisle number, etc. and you change the capacities. While the capacities affect the accumulator they are not a direct relationship - changing the capacity alone does not change the accumulator itself.
Now when you drop a "NEW POG FILL" for the associated POG# the only thing that happens to the accumulator is the addition of the new DPCIs and the expanded capacities of current DPCIs. It does not, I repeat, does NOT reset or decrease the accumulator for for all associated DPCIs. So if a DPCIs capacity decreased from, say, 2 to 1 on the shelf, when you backstock one of that DPCI the accumulator does not automatically reset to thinking that the shelf only needs one. It will actually constantly try to pull that 1 out of backstock for that DPCI until either A) you reset the accumulator B) the accumulator resets itself due to additional receipts or C) you sell the other one on the shelf. The only 'organic' way for the accumulator to be reset properly after this is for your store to sell both eaches of said DPCI, have it get zeroed out via point of sale, and then get another each of that DPCI sent in on another truck - which happens more often than you may think.
Our store stopped using the SUBT9999 process a year ago, and the errors remain about the same. Honestly most errors in the accumulator are human made. Somebody may stock 24 eaches of regular pepto bismol because they don't realize that half of that shelf space is reserved for cherry pepto bismol. An error like that will usually go unnoticed until a POG reset. By that point, the counts are already off because instocks/inventory counted what was on the shelf as the out, instead of actually auditing what was in the shelf space.
Now in terms of fixing our on hand situation, I respect your position Anonymous12345, and yes holding constests for mispicks would surely improve our accuracy. However, there is a LONG list of reasons why our on-hands are off by huge amounts. We regularly receive at least 5-20 cases per trailer that have labels for other store numbers, and no label for our store. Due to time constraints our only real choice is to push this product with the rest of our truck. We also receive at least 10-30 mispick cases per trailer. Over half of our flow team was hired in the last six months or later. They don't even know what the letters DPCI stand for - if I were to explain to one of them to read the DPCI printed on the side of the box and on the label and then check to see if it corresponds to the DPCI on the shelf strip I would probably blow their minds. Half of the time the mispicks are right next to the actual DPCI on the floor, so the pusher never realizes this and just puts the product in the right location. It's easy to tell when shampoo has a label for paper. It's less easy to tell when conditioner has a label for shampoo. Plus, I don't know about your store, but ours is constantly understaffed - the actual overnight backroom team has not finished a truck since february.
Also, you seem knowledgeable about the process - is there any way to identify and process mispicks out of the repacks? The closest thing I've ever seen to a repack receipt is the security list in electronics. Would you have to go through every repack in the store to identify all repack mispicks?