Archived Item Merge Woes

[j2e86]

For the past few months, our Item Merge Report has been increasingly problematic. It started out with three or four DPCIs a week that failed to merge. After MySupporting the issue and a series of exchanges in which they referred me to the Workbench page on how to perform MySupports, it was obvious that they didn't even know what an Item Merge was (seemingly 99% of the people at my store don't understand them either). I gave up on MySupporting failed merges and just started fixing everything with UPC maintenance -- which doesn't always work, because sometimes they'll break the UPC again the next week.

In the last month or two, it has gotten so bad that more than half of the DPCIs on our Item Merge Report have either failed to merge or are now not on file. The workload for manually fixing these with UPC maintenance became overwhelming and we started storing the problem items in receiving. They announced it was a company-wide problem a week or two ago and there has been no improvement. If I MySupport the issue now, they basically say "we know it's a problem, try again next week". The amount of inventory that has failed to merge correctly is growing out of control. Last week, 12 DPCIs on our report failed to merge (totalling around 20 UPCs). This week, they fixed two of those DPCIs, but there are 5 new failures.

A half dozen DPCIs a week that fail is an annoyance, but I fear the real problem is what's NOT on the report. The Item Merge Report I have access to only lists DPCIs with backroom locations at our store. What about all the DPCIs that didn't have backroom locations? I've run into issues with MIRs where old DPCIs apparently failed to merge, but I have no doubt we miss the vast majority of them.

Is anyone else having problems on this scale? What do you do? I've resigned to giving up on most of it and leaving it on a pallet in receiving until they fix it, unless it's a high value item, in which case I fix it manually so we can get it back to the floor.

 

[backroomguy]

I have been having the same issues and have escalated it directly to my group operations leader and she has been in contact with HQ on what is going on. They are aware that there is an issue but have yet to suspend issuing new item merges weekly, which makes no sense. Last week my merge was 13 items and only 1 scanned the new DPCI. A few weeks before that all the softlines bonus packs started scanning NOF, what a mess.

I have always fixed any issues with the items not merging at the store level using Store price management on store apps. You will need an etl login to get access. You can PM me and I will walk you through the process. It's alittle time consuming but that way you stay current on your item merges and you don't have to worry about going back once they decide to get them fixed. I still MySupport the issues so they are aware but just fix them myself.

 

[j2e86]

I have been having the same issues and have escalated it directly to my group operations leader and she has been in contact with HQ on what is going on. They are aware that there is an issue but have yet to suspend issuing new item merges weekly, which makes no sense. Last week my merge was 13 items and only 1 scanned the new DPCI. A few weeks before that all the softlines bonus packs started scanning NOF, what a mess.

I have always fixed any issues with the items not merging at the store level using Store price management on store apps. You will need an etl login to get access. You can PM me and I will walk you through the process. It's alittle time consuming but that way you stay current on your item merges and you don't have to worry about going back once they decide to get them fixed. I still MySupport the issues so they are aware but just fix them myself.

UPC Maintenance is the same thing as, or rather is a subset of, store price management. I don't have the time to spend 2+ hours a week merging UPCs manually. If you monitor the UPCs/DPCIs you've merged manually in following weeks, you may find that those merges have stopped working when headquarters tried to push another merge and broke things you'd fixed.

 

[anathema]

I've never had to do anything but print new labels with the DPCI and stick it on the product, is even that failing? I haven't been backroom in a while, but I did notice they were having trouble completing the merges.

 

[60SecondsRemaining]

The easiest way to do this is to make a bcode label with 49+newdpci and slap it over the old upcs.

It requires you to go find the items. Yes it's time consuming, but if you want a fix that stays fixed, it's the only way.

 

[RetailWorld]

Well, technically the new NOF best practice is that if it scans as NOF, you print a SIM barcode for it. I got tired of waiting for proper item merges on socks/underwear so we're SIM'ing a ton of the bonus packs just to get rid of them. We really don't have the payroll to hunt down 30+ DPCI's, print the barcodes, adjust on-hands, adjust SDQ's, and hope that the item merge doesn't screw up the on-hands yet again the following week.