MEGATHREAD Flexible Fulfillment

Announcement at our store on enhanced ship for store to begin in Oct. They have since moved the date up to August as they don't want it to create a problem during November and the holidays. It's going to take a big chunk of backroom space. Require hiring up to 80 new people, with extra payroll allotted, may turn into 24 hr operation. Anybody else going thru this?
 
Wow.. 80 more people? What are they doing? Turning you into a mini distribution center? If they're hiring that many people, you must have a broad area of coverage.
 
Unless the intent is to have over 100% sales increase, you wont get 80. I'm not going to reveal my sales increase,but its double digits, and we added less than 10 to get the job done.
 
My enhanced team is about 25 people with between 14-16 people on. (although we go through people faster than boxes). We've had to train about 6 new people in the last month. Two of which are basically gone already lol. ESFS legit requires a HUGE backroom. When we started last year, we got two shipments of 60 pallets each of just supplies. One of which consisted of just 280s, 277s, 278s, and 285s. We go through pallets of those like water. So just a heads up, if you're going enhanced, make absolutely sure to keep on top of box ordering or else you're screwed.

Also be prepared to become very familiar with CSC because the system breaks almost every day.
 
Moosechives said:
My enhanced team is about 25 people with between 14-16 people on. (although we go through people faster than boxes). We've had to train about 6 new people in the last month. Two of which are basically gone already lol. ESFS legit requires a HUGE backroom. When we started last year, we got two shipments of 60 pallets each of just supplies. One of which consisted of just 280s, 277s, 278s, and 285s. We go through pallets of those like water. So just a heads up, if you're going enhanced, make absolutely sure to keep on top of box ordering or else you're screwed.

Also be prepared to become very familiar with CSC because the system breaks almost every day.
Click to expand...
This is fascinating to me.. How many shipments do you send out in a day? What does your inbound logistics process look like? How many trucks a week? How much business does your store get in-house?
 
We don't do the shipping from store just the reg FA. To start with the etls/lod were doing it ...now the backroom took it over. We also were told that we can not hit the Item not found option...while in the FA app. We were told that if we look for the item and cant find it ...we have to team up with an etl/lod and let them look for it ...and take it from there.
 
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LogisticsFox said:
This is fascinating to me.. How many shipments do you send out in a day? What does your inbound logistics process look like? How many trucks a week? How much business does your store get in-house?
Click to expand...

We're at 700 orders a day so far. We have a dedicated UPS trailer in one of our bays at all times basically. I don't know the exact amount of inbound trucks we get (we're overnight flow) but our online only stuff also comes in on the regular trucks as well. We also have our own section designated for just online only items. This gets a little annoying because the only way to tell the difference when backstocking is by looking in NOP or Item Search. Web only items at the moment use a fake store location (here it's FF77). We have to pull our web only items out of the regular backroom locations all the time.

ESFS days can be either super smooth or all out hell especially depending on the ad. If diapers are on sale, then I guarantee it will be a crap week. The other month we got hit hard by a reseller who bought 80-100 boxes of diapers a day for the entire week. Another week there was the toilet paper deal. People were buying 6-10 scott or cottonelle toilet paper things among other brands.

To put it bluntly, ESFS and SFS are useless if the other processes in your store are sub-par. If instocks is wrong, our fulfillment % is screwed. If backroom accuracy is wrong, our fulfillment % is screwed. If flow...yeah. With a 700 order max we can't spend too much time trying to find an item or else we'll get behind. We're making attempts to fix fulfillment % but yeah....thats a long way from being green.

PS... I wouldn't be surprised if market/food starts going out soon since we started shipping out coffee and baby food the other week. lololol...
 
My team consists of 20-25 team members not counting the 10 we have on overnight. It's impossible to not have any INFs. Some things just aren't there but there are certain team members who come back with INFs in softlines all the time. We were told to partner with a team member to search for the item and to check all the usual areas (reshop, fitting room, backroom, caf pulls, etc.) before hitting the INF button. We also started writing down the dpci in an INF book and then our team lead or etl would go over those numbers and fix the counts so we would stop getting orders for them.
Our store is considered a training store since we were the first and biggest ESFS center. We have about 6 packing stations in our backroom which isn't even enough sometimes considering how many people we have on dayside. We usually send out around 1,000 orders a day.
 
@Moosechives @Kaybee988

What in the actual fuck!?

80 TMs!
Overnight teams!
6 packing stations!
1000 orders a day!

That is sounding like ESFS is one of the biggest and most important workcenters in the store.

How much extra freight is coming in on trucks compared to before you started?

And is there a list somewhere of which stores are/will be participating? As crazy as it is compared to regular SFS, I want to see if there are any stores nearby that are doing the enhanced version.
 
At every huddle, they tell us that flex is the biggest workcenter in the store.
I haven't worked overnight but there are usually about 2 or 3 pallets of online items waiting to be backstocked when I get in in the morning. We just changed up our shifts so we have 2 people come in at 4 am, 2 at 6 am, 4 at 8 am, 4 at 9 am, then 12 and closers from 130-930.
I don't know if there's a list but we had a big visit a while ago from ETLs and STLs mostly from the Philadelphia area looking to start ESFS in their stores.
 
If anyone is interested, I did find a list of sorts for stores with ESFS and those with SFS. When you go to store reports and find the weekly ship from store report, once it downloads there is a drop down list of every participating store.

There were only 3 stores listed for ESFS and none of them sounded familiar.

But hopefully they will add some stores to it soon. I talked to my STL today about SFS and she said that it now makes about 5% of our store's sales. She is pushing hard to bring ESFS to our store to boost sales even more and tip us back to an A volume.
 
I see FF as a sign of humanity's path toward what life is going to be like in the future. We will probably make earth so dirty that we have to leave and have Johnny 5's son clean it for us while we get fat and sit on our butts in chairs that hover.
 
There are going to be a lot of new ESFS stores in the near future. Because of this huge increase the rest of us are going to be lowered to 300 orders from 700 (according to a redwire) in July which will cut our hours in half (team of 13-14 people scheduled per day down to probably 8-10)

Also, as a heads up, ESFS is a supreme space hog. Huge backrooms are a requirement because of the extra 400+ DPCIs of online only merch and 5-10 pallets of each sized boxes and other supplies. For example, we have 11 pallets of just 439s. We have about 5 aisles in the BR dedicated to just online only and 2 bulk aisles in the steels for just boxes and supplies. On top of that, we have 4 pack stations (some have 6) and 20 cart hold locations. Needless to say, it's a huge change to the backroom and the store's team in general. You'll have to hire and train 10-15 or even 20 new people for the SFS team depending on your payroll and order max. Once the dust settles though, ESFS is pretty fun for the most part. (except for digging through 1000 boxes on a 53' UPS truck to find an order a TM messed up on)
 
konk said:
Let me scan from the picture screen damnit!
Click to expand...
Someone heard your screams apparently...

Although the picture is even smaller now (didn't think that was possible).
 
We just got the update on Monday and since nobody knew anything about the new picking process (I assume it is the same process that ESFS has already been using), I got to spend my whole shift figuring it out myself.

Does anyone know how to print the PACK01 label? And is there an easy way to see how many orders there are waiting to be picked? Those are the only two things that I couldn't figure out.
 
I was not the happiest of campers when the "new" update came mainly cause we've been using the cart system since the start...which meant I had to relabel all 21 carts with the only difference being one less 0 in the location. :| That and our system broke for near 3 days which leads to a very bored group of 13 TMs.

I'm pretty sure you can get PACK01 labels from Workbench by clicking Logistics -> Ship From Store or Enhanced Ship From Store then digging through the stuff on there. I forgot exactly where it is though but I'm pretty sure I saw it there when I looked. Here's a free tip though: if you're pressed for time and you're stuck running your cart back to scan into the pack station right before the 2pm deadline, instead of hurrying, just type the pack station in instead of rushing to scan (example PACK01 or PACK02). Also, if you're away from your cart, you can type in the hold location after the item is picked. (example: picking a shirt in ready to wear then typing SHPAA04 for the bar then walking back to the cart and moving on.) Are you guys still doing individual orders (in pick item just like guest pickups) or do you batch orders (pick batches) like us? Regardless when it comes to ESFS all we can do is note how many orders are ready to be batched before we drop them.
 
Definitely going to try that tip tomorrow. Hate going back and forth to the cart scanning each Item
 
We batch orders. we only have 2 TMs, one at 6-130, one at 830-5. 6 carts. 1st TM picks, 2nd TM packs. We get more than 100 orders that way.
 
Thankfully, they limited batches to 25 items each a few updates ago so things dont get ridiculous if you forget to batch for awhile. I usually try to (when I'm not bombarded by 20 things) drop batches every 10 orders to keep things from getting overwhelming. There would be some times I'd get sidetracked for 10 minutes and there would be 60 orders to be batched. Then again, I'm speaking from a 700 order standpoint so it's probably not that bad lol.

Tip #2: Feel free to print off extra hold locations (parent and 4 child) and put them on sheets of paper in case the carts show up as "in use" or for rush orders. That way you don't waste an entire cart for one or two items.
 
Yeah I noticed right away that I would need to type the cart location if I'm picking in the electronics or HBA backrooms...no way I'd be able to get a cart in there.

The update introduced the carts and order batching for us. I still cannot believe how not a single word was said about it beforehand and none of the leaders working Monday had any clue how to help.

Right now we have 8 carts for 3 TMs and 150 orders...I think we can probably spare one for rush orders.
 
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I usually check redwire every morning because thats where the majority of our news comes in. I'm usually the first to see our posts then print a few copies and relay those messages to my TL/ETL. For this update though, there was no "real" redwire for us. It just said in a nutshell, "your hold locations are changing" without saying how or why or to what. I basically had to start printing new locations when I came in to see if something happened. That's what really annoyed me. A few SFS in my area lucked out though, cause they came by a few weeks before to train with the new cart system lol.
 

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