MEGATHREAD Flexible Fulfillment

Is my turd store the only Target store where the STL calls headquarters to bitch about items not being in the building and then waiting almost the entire hour to delete/cancel the FF order? I seriously don't understand the STL's brain. When you're obsessed with pleasing your DTL master and getting your bonus, you will get bad results.
If I look on the shelf for the item, the backroom, pulls, and foreign at guest service and the item isn't any of those places, it's not in the building.

That means you swallow your pride and fucking delete or cancel the order.

Or better yet just let me do it. Oh wait, you will have a heart attack if I do. Maybe I can go back to deleting them and just have some Bayer in my pocket to give you just in case have a heart attack.

If the item isn't the in building, I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DELETE THE FF ORDER. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BEG OR PLEAD with OR CHASE AN ETL DOWN AND GET THEM TO DELETE IT. FUCK YOU CORPORATE.
 
tgtJose said:
I have half a mind to go to the store that sent me this package and smack the TM who packed it. We use air pillows for a reason!!! Also, maybe use less tape and more bubble wrap!!!

Yes, I know all of this is available in my store, but it's just so much easier to get it shipped to my door for free.
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Ya know I got scared for a minute because the minute I saw bubble wrap I got worried. But it's not something I packed thank god, our air pillow machine needs belts and we never received them. Apparently no one has bothered calling to see where the hell they went.
 
Leonhart621 said:
What's SA stand for?
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Ships Alone

I think the idea is that all large items will be in a separate batch so that the TM picking can grab a tub or something to pick it. But at 100 orders a day, all our SA batches are just one or two items, so I usually see where it is and then suspend the batch I'm working on when I come to it and just shove it in my cart. No wasted time coming back out to the sales floor for a single item.
 
I'd say that 85% of our SA batches are furniture in the back. We have a fucking massive backroom so it can be a bit of a pain, since we tend to have so many SA orders. Like I said above, we had about 15 SA batches and they each had somewhere between 5 and 10 items apiece. Usually it's better for us to complete all of the regular batches then just do all of the SA at the end since our furniture is kept near our packing stations. It's fairly annoying though when one of the items is located in one of our Flexible Fulfillment aisles since they are quite a ways away from our packing station. Although the worst thing in the world is when there is non-located furniture in the SA batches. Like I said, our backroom is massive so finding a single piece of unlocated furniture is pretty much impossible. When I left for the day, there were around 9 batches still left in the gun that were all unlocated furniture items that couldn't be found. The unfortunate thing is that our TL wasn't scheduled yesterday and the ones that were scheduled didn't know what to do in this scenario, so we just did as much as we could before we left. I'm sure our TL wasn't happy when he came in this morning.

And when we have an insanely busy day like yesterday, that means one of us usually spends about 2-3 hours just picking these furniture items. If you aren't confident about using the power equipment, after a couple of days like this you will be.
 
Jackswastedlife99 said:
Is my turd store the only Target store where the STL calls headquarters to bitch about items not being in the building and then waiting almost the entire hour to delete/cancel the FF order? I seriously don't understand the STL's brain. When you're obsessed with pleasing your DTL master and getting your bonus, you will get bad results.
If I look on the shelf for the item, the backroom, pulls, and foreign at guest service and the item isn't any of those places, it's not in the building.

That means you swallow your pride and fucking delete or cancel the order.

Or better yet just let me do it. Oh wait, you will have a heart attack if I do. Maybe I can go back to deleting them and just have some Bayer in my pocket to give you just in case have a heart attack.

If the item isn't the in building, I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DELETE THE FF ORDER. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BEG OR PLEAD with OR CHASE AN ETL DOWN AND GET THEM TO DELETE IT. FUCK YOU CORPORATE.
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target just doesn't trust pullers. this is what happens when you get the back room just saying i looked and didn't see it in 5 seconds and its not here while we did have it. you do your job. a lot dont.
 
I never understood why we aren't allowed to delete FF orders. We are trusted with SFS orders, but god help you if you INF an SPU. Having to chase down the ETL to cancel it is just ridiculous. And half of them will just say "Okay, I'll try to find it" as if it'll somehow magically appear because they are looking for it. Thankfully, a few of my ETLs know that if I can't find it, we simply don't have it. So instead of wasting time trying to hunt down this non-existent item they'll just cancel the order no questions asked.
 
This is a time when leaders who don't care is actually a benefit. Never have I asked them if it's ok to delete a FF and I've never been talked to.
 
Firefox said:
I never understood why we aren't allowed to delete FF orders. We are trusted with SFS orders, but god help you if you INF an SPU.
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The main difference is that when you INF an SFS order, it will get routed to another location and the guest won't be impacted at all. When you do it on an SPU, the guest will either have to cancel it or choose to pick it up at another store.

When we started getting the message about getting LOD approval before cancelling an SPU, I asked and was told "you have standing approval to do it every time."
 
I'm in the same boat. If the SPU item is not found, I just have approval to cancel it. Except for this one new ETL. She always tries to find the item for me and tries to act like I am a trainee. Really pisses me off. Go away.... I could do your job, and I've been doing this since before you even graduated with your stupid worthless degree that you got hired for.

And just because it sums up my day.... When this is the "location" when picking for SFS
 
Non-located furniture is far worse. We have 2 rows of steel with locations from 114 to 138, each with 6 letters, and each letter with 4 spaces, packed to the brim with furniture. It's impossible. Plus, a ton of the pallets are stacked so horribly that it's difficult if not impossible to use the crown and difficult/unsafe to use the wave.
 
Damn, today was crazy too, and I wasn't even scheduled as Flexible Fulfillment. I was scheduled Backroom, but I was asked to help pack since there were still 90 packs left at 3 o'clock. I also had the joy of dealing with another metric fuckton of SIO items, I think we loaded up 7 or 8 flats worth of furniture/SIO items onto the trailer when all was said and done. Not even counting the packed boxes. There were also about 20 or so SIO packs that didn't get done yesterday, so we had to add that to our workload. Oodles of fun.
 
I had an SA batch today for...a makeup bag. Why would something like that need to be shipped alone?

I suppose the dimensions on file could have been incorrect since the recommended box was 278, but this happens pretty frequently.

I usually go into an SA batch to see what it is and where it's at, then pick another batch and suspend it to grab the SA batch when I'm in the area. It's just needless extra work for me.

It would be nice if it only existed at ESFS since they clearly do have a need for it.
 
UPS is picking up at about 1 pm now on Saturdays. Which we did not change the schedule for. As a result I had left over packages that sat there through Monday evening. So we had quite a bit of overflow.

Anyone else have this happen? The UPS guy said Target told them that the new pickup time for Saturday is about 1 pm now...

So we started scheduling SFS to start at 6 from now on for Saturdays. :p
 
UPS usually tries to pick up from us on Saturday afternoons, despite the fact that we have a drop trailer on weekends.

We love having the trailer and don't want to send it back almost empty in case they decide we don't need it anymore. So I always load up the trailer before leaving on Saturday and lock the dock door. Only thing the afternoon pickup gets is the next day air orders. If he wants more, he'll have to take the whole damn trailer.

Shadowski said:
The UPS guy said Target told them that the new pickup time for Saturday is about 1 pm now...
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Unless something has recently changed, local UPS facilities are supposed to work directly with the individual stores to determine pickup times and methods. If 1pm is too early, your ETL-LOG should be able to call them and ask for a later time... After all Target is the customer in this situation and UPS will do what they can to keep our business.
 
We get a rush order driver around 5pm on Saturday, and honestly that is cutting it close. Since on the east coast the Today rush order cutoff time is 4pm, and if the driver comes early, then they might miss a rush order or two.

Also, we've had so many god damn SA batches that I feel like we need to have a trailer at all times. On weekdays, our order count is usually roughly the same as on the weekends except that we have no trailer, so everything just sits jam packed in our little corner of the backroom with little to no walking space.
 
@Firefox can you put full pallets on the back side of the line and then move them to receiving after the dock closes?
 
SFSFun said:
@Firefox can you put full pallets on the back side of the line and then move them to receiving after the dock closes?
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Potentially. The issue though is that our receiving and reverse logistics area is small due to the nature of the unique layout of my store, and it would interrupt a lot with the truck unload later in the night. When the line is set, pretty much every square foot of space is occupied by some pallet or another, so there is no place to keep our SA items other than the in our little corner with our packing stations. Can't go into too much detail for anonymity's sake, but suffice it to say that it would be impractical.
 
Ah I was hoping your UPS pickup was long before the overnight team came in.
 
SFSFun said:
Ah I was hoping your UPS pickup was long before the overnight team came in.
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Well they are, but the problem is that there are some days where the only the Rush Order guy comes in, and since we have no trailer, it just sits wherever it can fit. It boggles my mind how we can be an ESFS with a 300 order cap, yet we only have a trailer on weekends and only the rush order guy comes in some days. And then when a day is skipped, we'll have 500-600 packaged orders waiting around and they'll bring a dinky little van.
 
That is pretty ridiculous and something that could probably be fixed by a call to UPS from an ETL. Back when we were at 150 orders, we talked to the UPS Key Accounts executive for our area about what could be done to make things easier. His whole job is to land big clients and keep them happy. The next day they started making the daily pickup with a large tractor trailer that we could just slide the entire pallets into.
 
SFSFun said:
\

Unless something has recently changed, local UPS facilities are supposed to work directly with the individual stores to determine pickup times and methods. If 1pm is too early, your ETL-LOG should be able to call them and ask for a later time... After all Target is the customer in this situation and UPS will do what they can to keep our business.
Click to expand...

We don't have an ETL-LOG... and have not for about 3 months now. And they don't seem to be in a hurry to get one :(

We've had 4 ETL-LOG in 2 years, so..... blek. I've questioned it with the TL and the STL (who really is a great guy) and both respond that the pickup is 1pm now, so... we're scheduling earlier. I donno what their plan is and they sually are very forthcoming, so meh. Beats me! I just "Captain" the station as they call it. :p
 
So today was a shitshow for all involved. I was initially scheduled as Backroom from 9a-5pm, but as soon as I get in my BRTL tells me that I'll be doing SFS all day. No problem, that's cool. Till I see that we have 52 batches in the gun. WTF. Probably around 15 are SA, while the remaining 37 are full 25 item batches and we only had 4 people scheduled today. So me and one other BRTM are picking as fast as humanly possible, along with the other 3 FFTMs and the FFTL. When I had a full 3 tier after about 3 batches, I went to our packing area to tie down the cart and get a new one as they had a fair number of large items. I saw that our FFTL (who I will call Jordan) and one veteran FFTM (who I will call Kevin) are there, and they're clearly stressed out about this giant workload. I'm still questioning if this really happened or not, several hours after the fact, but all of a sudden Jordan just starts fucking screaming at Kevin about something innocuous like picking the wrong item or something. After about a minute into his tirade, he just says "Fuck it! I'm done, fuck you, and fuck this place." and walks out, but not before throwing his PDA in the general direction of the equipment cage. I didn't see anything happen to his walkie, so he might have just walked out with it for all I know.

I just kinda stood there is shock, but Kevin doesn't miss a beat and calls out over the walkie "So hey guys, Jordan just quit. Don't worry too much about it, let's knock these batches out." I stood there for another ten seconds or so, before I hesitantly went back to work. Compared to that, the rest of the shift was fairly boring, but in the end we got all the batches pick and almost everything packed and roughly a half of the packed orders onto the trailer.

Now the whole team is just kinda clueless as to how to proceed. I guess for now our BRTL will be taking over most of the Flexible Fulfillment ordering, or he'll pass that on to the veteran FFTM to handle. I'm guessing that they'll put one of the more veteran FFTMs into the now vacant TL spot. And of course, since this happened on a Friday, we'll be shorthanded over the weekend. It's gonna be interesting the next couple of weeks.
 

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