Archived Manual CAF's

[rugrat]

My Food ETL asked us to start doing manual CAF's at night in grocery. Can anyone explain the upside of doing this as opposed to letting the system generated CAF's take care of this. Does the lower % pull trigger really lighten up your backroom in a significant way?

 

[DMNDZ bruhh]

surprisingly yes, the work load can be ALOT more easy on us. we usually pull after our last caf has been pulled or before the 1st one is pulled. we usually do it in places that are always hammered throughout the day like Chemicals, paper, HBA, HBA though is by far the worst one to pull because the pull time is almost an hour long, but then are CAFs become smaller which is good

 

[Sarakiel]

What time exactly are you describing for and what is your CAF schedule? Is it for helping the Auto-Fill pulls for O/N? Are there trailers involved? Are your pulls 11-1-3-5, 11-12-1-2-3-4-5-7, 7-11-1-3-5, etc etc?

We have 8 scheduled CAF's with the 11-7 setup, and if we drop in MAN CAF's between 5-7, it's going to help the dayside backroom by easing their pulls for the 7's. If we drop MAN CAF's after 7, then we're helping the O/N team by lowering the Auto-Fill numbers when they drop at 10:00PM.

Simply put, there's a lot of factors and influence into play when dropping them in at certain hours, and overall it helps everyone in the end by "manipulating" the system into making later system batches much lighter by pulling it earlier.

 

[Rock Lobster]

What time exactly are you describing for and what is your CAF schedule? Is it for helping the Auto-Fill pulls for O/N? Are there trailers involved? Are your pulls 11-1-3-5, 11-12-1-2-3-4-5-7, 7-11-1-3-5, etc etc?

We have 8 scheduled CAF's with the 11-7 setup, and if we drop in MAN CAF's between 5-7, it's going to help the dayside backroom by easing their pulls for the 7's. If we drop MAN CAF's after 7, then we're helping the O/N team by lowering the Auto-Fill numbers when they drop at 10:00PM.

Simply put, there's a lot of factors and influence into play when dropping them in at certain hours, and overall it helps everyone in the end by "manipulating" the system into making later system batches much lighter by pulling it earlier.

The biggest benefit I see to manuals (I honestly don't see a huge usage for them) is that you can drop them whenever you want and they are not timed (however they do hurt CAF timeliness if they aren't done before an hourly CAF drops, so don't drop one at 11:59)... So sometimes it beneficial if you know that you won't be able to get the 11s done in the hour given due to staffing issues, but you do have the staffing at 9:30 to 10:30, to drop them then so the 11s then become possible for one person...

 

[Sarakiel]

MAN CAF's still have the 2-hour timed window that carried over from the old 11-1-3-5 2-hour batches and shows up on a separate DTK report of what batches were dropped, what team members dropped them in and the percentage of them completed on time. Most people just don't know about the 2-hour time limit since the 1-hour CAF batches arrived, which I agree does make it irrelevant since it needs to be done before the next hourly batches drop.

Regarding usage and beneficial effect, I suppose it would really depend on the volume of the store that you would see a huge benefit to Manual's. For example, on the weekdays our Scheduled CAF's look like this based upon the buying trend of the store:

(Grocery batches trigger)11: 220
(All batches trigger)12: 300
1: 200
2: 185
3: 210
4: 240
5: 275
(Grocery batches trigger with a raised trigger %)7: 330

If we dropped grocery MAN's in the early morning from 8 to 11, it helps the opener's with the 11's and 12's. If they were then dropped between 3 and 5, it would help the closers by lowering the 7's.

Weekends look like this:

(Grocery batches trigger)11: 275
(All batches trigger)12: 380
1: 280
2: 275
3: 295
4: 310
5: 325
(Grocery batches trigger with a raised trigger %)7: 430

At this point, any grocery MAN CAF's between any hourly pull would help due to the sheer size of the batches.