MEGATHREAD Flexible Fulfillment

[RunForACallBox]

I see what you're saying, but maybe they want more people pushing before the store opens? Just a guess.

Understood, but at the expense my workcenter. That’s what I do not like.

 

[happygoth]

Understood, but at the expense my workcenter. That’s what I do not like.

Ok, maybe I'm just dense, but why is that at the expense of Fulfillment? Is it because you should be filling orders for that hour and a half instead of pushing GM? Assuming that they have a finite amount of hours to schedule, if they gave those hours to GM DBOs, wouldn't they then be scheduling you to come in later, or leave earlier, or have less Fulfillment TMs scheduled? If they gave those hours to the DBOs, then they would be taking them away from you, correct? So is your bottom line argument that you want more hours for Fulfillment, or more hours for DBOs? Or both? Or is it just that you don't want to push truck? Or all of the above? 😁

 

[Captain Orca]

If they had any sense they'd go back to the 4a unload, dedicated Flow team, dedicated back room team, 7 cages on the floor, cardboard in...when full....back to the baler....dump....make bale....back out. We did it that way for years and the truck 99% of the time got pushed, floor was clean and you didn't have to work around customers. We had a good time and it got done.

 

[seasonaldude]

Ok, maybe I'm just dense, but why is that at the expense of Fulfillment? Is it because you should be filling orders for that hour and a half instead of pushing GM? Assuming that they have a finite amount of hours to schedule, if they gave those hours to GM DBOs, wouldn't they then be scheduling you to come in later, or leave earlier, or have less Fulfillment TMs scheduled? If they gave those hours to the DBOs, then they would be taking them away from you, correct? So is your bottom line argument that you want more hours for Fulfillment, or more hours for DBOs? Or both? Or is it just that you don't want to push truck? Or all of the above? 😁

All of the above in my opinion. We're fulfillment. We like our work center. It's what we want to do. If we wanted to be GM, we'd asked to be moved. I'll gladly help out other areas if I'm not busy, but I'm going to make sure my area is all taken care of before touching any freight. And, if I do touch freight, I'll be pushing whatever benefits fulfillment the most so don't even bother asking me to grab that furniture flat when a baby food Uboat is still on the line. Alas, I'm comping around 100% on OPUs the last two months and that's after last year comping over 200%. OPUs are now typically accounting for 4-6% of daily store sales. We're always busy. Don't bother me with GM shit.

 

[RunForACallBox]

Ok, maybe I'm just dense, but why is that at the expense of Fulfillment? Is it because you should be filling orders for that hour and a half instead of pushing GM? Assuming that they have a finite amount of hours to schedule, if they gave those hours to GM DBOs, wouldn't they then be scheduling you to come in later, or leave earlier, or have less Fulfillment TMs scheduled? If they gave those hours to the DBOs, then they would be taking them away from you, correct? So is your bottom line argument that you want more hours for Fulfillment, or more hours for DBOs? Or both? Or is it just that you don't want to push truck? Or all of the above? 😁

No, I came in at 7a regular time I always did. Kept me doing other DBO shit until 10a when myself and other Fulfillment TMs finally got going in SFS. Then want to bitch and whine that we have 200 left to pick at 1p. I just turned my walkie off and kept packing. No longer my fucking problem to help to fix your bullshit you made.

 

[RunForACallBox]

All of the above in my opinion. We're fulfillment. We like our work center. It's what we want to do. If we wanted to be GM, we'd asked to be moved. I'll gladly help out other areas if I'm not busy, but I'm going to make sure my area is all taken care of before touching any freight. And, if I do touch freight, I'll be pushing whatever benefits fulfillment the most so don't even bother asking me to grab that furniture flat when a baby food Uboat is still on the line. Alas, I'm comping around 100% on OPUs the last two months and that's after last year comping over 200%. OPUs are now typically accounting for 4-6% of daily store sales. We're always busy. Don't bother me with GM shit.

Thank you. Since everyone wants to attack me for not wanting to do someone else’s job while my work center suffered.

 

[happygoth]

I definitely wasn't attacking you, just trying to clarify the issues. Having you push until 10 is ridiculous because now they are definitely encroaching on your Fulfillment time.

If I'm normlly scheduled, say, 9-4 to work my area and they schedule me in a different area from 8-9, and I work that area until 9 and then jump into my regular work center, no harm, no foul. If they schedule me to come in for 8 and then don't let me hit my area until 10 or later, well now my area will suffer and that is a horse of a different color.

 

[Bosch]

All of the above in my opinion. We're fulfillment. We like our work center. It's what we want to do. If we wanted to be GM, we'd asked to be moved. I'll gladly help out other areas if I'm not busy, but I'm going to make sure my area is all taken care of before touching any freight. And, if I do touch freight, I'll be pushing whatever benefits fulfillment the most so don't even bother asking me to grab that furniture flat when a baby food Uboat is still on the line. Alas, I'm comping around 100% on OPUs the last two months and that's after last year comping over 200%. OPUs are now typically accounting for 4-6% of daily store sales. We're always busy. Don't bother me with GM shit.

Thank you. Since everyone wants to attack me for not wanting to do someone else’s job while my work center suffered.

All of this all day long..

 

[Moosechives]

Ironically enough, they've stopped pulling my fulfillment team for GM because our DBOs are so shit at their job we end up barely finishing before deadline because we spend so much time digging through their messes to fill our orders~

 

[Far from newbie]

On the flip side of this - our presentation team is often pulled to pitch in fulfillment and we tout the same: we have a specific list of work to be finished within a strict time yet we lose many hours per week “not doing our job - helping the other team”.
Ironically a goal of modernization was to dissolve ‘teams’ and create a work force of tm’s that completed the tasks of ALL the teams of the past - each tm is now a flow, Instocks, backroom, presentation and pricing tm. The only seperate teams left are flex and transition and we are complaining - kind of makes you think modernization has something.

 

[seasonaldude]

I definitely wasn't attacking you, just trying to clarify the issues. Having you push until 10 is ridiculous because now they are definitely encroaching on your Fulfillment time.

If I'm normlly scheduled, say, 9-4 to work my area and they schedule me in a different area from 8-9, and I work that area until 9 and then jump into my regular work center, no harm, no foul. If they schedule me to come in for 8 and then don't let me hit my area until 10 or later, well now my area will suffer and that is a horse of a different color.

Here's the thing. Spot store leadership tends to view fulfillment as an eternal hour fountain. We get a lot of hours alloted from corporate that have to be spent on our work center. Leadership has trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that we get those hours because we are increasingly exponentially busier. So they plan to schedule fulfillment hours but actually use them for GM. And, hey, well, if fulfillment suffers as a result, golly gee can't you guys just work faster???? So, someone scheduled to start in GM and later move to fulfillment knows that leadership is really thinking that they'll stay in GM after the scheduled time and the other TMs in fulfillment will magically sprout wings plus the ability to pull unlocated items out of their asses to make up for the loss of fulfillment hours. In reality it doesn't work that way. We need our hours for our work center. If it turns out we're not busy, then we can go help others. But, it really shouldn't be assumed that we won't be busy.

 

[Antennae]

We're already at 4.5% of last year's total units for OPU and it hasn't even been two weeks into the fiscal year.

We busy.

 

[Bosch]

We're already at 4.5% of last year's total units for OPU and it hasn't even been two weeks into the fiscal year.

We busy.

Yep, we are not seeing the same flow of orders we have seen before. We would get a dip or calm space tues-friday the orders would slow way down. Nope this last few weeks they have been solid about 9:30 am they ramp up and keep flowing til about 8pm when they finally chill out where one person can handle them. But no lets hammer one person trying to pick the OPU's and SFS and then complain at noon when three quarters of the SFS haven't been touched yet. But two of the three people that are scheduled as flex are actually pushing the truck for hours.. I have just started to come in, keep OPU under control, pick what SFS I can, punch out and go home.. Let the idiots who plan this mess clean it up.

 

[Bosch]

After three months we finally got OPU labels today.. Holy hell that took forever.

 

[Staffwoman]

I don't understand the scheduling. The busiest time at our store right now is in the morning. The schedule has one person coming in at 7:45am. The next person comes in at 11am. That 7:45 person walks into who knows how many OPU's and drive ups. If the GM3 tl is scheduled, they'll jump in and help because the timer starts at 730am I think. But if the tl isn't there, every morning we hear, can someone help pick? Then at noon, another fulfillment tm comes in. Well, it's not heavy then. Everything is caught up. And we're only averaging about 50 sfs units a day. So why in the world is EVERY morning stressful? Every morning.

 

[Bosch]

I don't understand the scheduling. The busiest time at our store right now is in the morning. The schedule has one person coming in at 7:45am. The next person comes in at 11am. That 7:45 person walks into who knows how many OPU's and drive ups. If the GM3 tl is scheduled, they'll jump in and help because the timer starts at 730am I think. But if the tl isn't there, every morning we hear, can someone help pick? Then at noon, another fulfillment tm comes in. Well, it's not heavy then. Everything is caught up. And we're only averaging about 50 sfs units a day. So why in the world is EVERY morning stressful? Every morning.

They have the second person coming in to cover lunches. They don't give a fuck about work flow.

 

[Staffwoman]

They have the second person coming in to cover lunches. They don't give a fuck about work flow.

That 7:45 person is usually only scheduled until 12:45 so no lunch.

 

[seasonaldude]

That 7:45 person is usually only scheduled until 12:45 so no lunch.

They're just stupid and don't take the work center seriously. This appears to be a rather commom problem for Target store leadership unfortunately. They probably think the 7:45 person is doing a bad job because he/she has to always call for help when they really just need to work faster. If I were that picker, I would go into complete fuck it mode, aka autotomatically INFing everything that wasn't precisely where it was supposed to be at first glance, and then finding a way to let the SD/ETLs know why there were so many INFs: "Hey, [SD] we're green on picked on time. INFs are really high though because we have so little time to look for things with our current morning volume. Things have calmed down now though, so we should see INFs decreasing the rest of the day hopefully." Let's them know what the problem is so they can fix it without being confrontational and blaming leadership. Important because they'll always back other leaders, no matter how fucking stupid, over regular TMs.

 

[Black Sheep 214]

Yep, ASANTS, but a majority of leadership just doesn’t seem to understand the concept that the SFS team can’t be a reserve team to pull from for other tasks if they are expected to keep their metrics green. No one has the TMs backs anymore, the TLs who would back them up are long gone. ETLs back up other ETLs, but backing up TLs, not so much, if at all, since the function of the TL is apparently to stand between the ETL and any sort of blame or accountability. Not a great place to be since most ETLs will screw over SFS/OPU in a heartbeat, take their hours (the few hours that the SD hasn’t already allocated to other workcenters) and pull the team to make them push or do whatever makes that ETL look good, but puts SFS so far behind that they can’t catch up. Then when SFS misses goals, it’s not the ETL that gets the write up, its the SFS TL.

 

[RunForACallBox]

Yep, ASANTS, but a majority of leadership just doesn’t seem to understand the concept that the SFS team can’t be a reserve team to pull from for other tasks if they are expected to keep their metrics green. No one has the TMs backs anymore, the TLs who would back them up are long gone. ETLs back up other ETLs, but backing up TLs, not so much, if at all, since the function of the TL is apparently to stand between the ETL and any sort of blame or accountability. Not a great place to be since most ETLs will screw over SFS/OPU in a heartbeat, take their hours (the few hours that the SD hasn’t already allocated to other workcenters) and pull the team to make them push or do whatever makes that ETL look good, but puts SFS so far behind that they can’t catch up. Then when SFS misses goals, it’s not the ETL that gets the write up, its the SFS TL.

This. All of this.

 

[Exhausted]

I’d like to highlight the fact that these issues stem from the leadership. You can’t blame DBOs for being “shitty” at their jobs when they are barely scheduled enough hours to push their OFOs.

 

[ThatAPguy]

I’d like to highlight the fact that these issues stem from the leadership. You can’t blame DBOs for being “shitty” at their jobs when they are barely scheduled enough hours to push their OFOs.

I agree and would like to add you can’t blame the TL’s for being “shitty” and not leading enough when they have to do all the work the DBOs can’t do because they aren’t scheduled enough hours.

 

[Moosechives]

I’d like to highlight the fact that these issues stem from the leadership. You can’t blame DBOs for being “shitty” at their jobs when they are barely scheduled enough hours to push their OFOs.

I definitely agree with it being shitty leadership. We can't push properly, backstock properly, dispose of cardboard properly, etc. What pisses me off is when my team gets shit on for not digging through the 40 different places this item COULD be other than the one place it SHOULD be. When it takes upwards of 10-20 plus minutes to look for each dpci and almost 2 hours for a batch, you should be able to sense that there's a deeper problem than "your team isn't looking hard enough".

 

[ThreeCreeks]

We’re really busy right now and most days I’m alone until 3 (I work 730-4). It’s ridiculous. In addition to running OPU and SFS I’m also in charge of another area until mid March and often get called to do this and that. I’ve never missed a pick on time or flex goal but it’s rubbish. I walked 17 miles in an 8 hour shift today. Luckily my closer came in at 1 so I had 3 hours of layover.

Oh and today they tied seasonal but all the sh*t is sitting on 30 wrapped pallets in shipping containers outside so my combined INF was 17%. Our INF for the entire week last week was 1.3%. I understand it needs to be tied but they haven’t even started pushing it yet.

 

[Far from newbie]

We pre-tie so we have a location and don’t actually tie until it is pushed. We had so much Easter trapped we waited until the very last minute of TWT compliance to tie and clear it.