Archived Opt

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cihyfthedoor

Former BRTL – not working @ Target anymore! :D
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Feb 28, 2012
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Anyone else an OPT store? That's Offsite Prevention Tactics. If you aren't a space constrained store, you probably aren't on OPT. The idea is to use a Just-In-Time inventory control process between the DC and the Store. This is when more product is held at the big giant super ultra mega huge square-miles-of-space distribution center instead of the small, tiny, itty bitty little less-than-20k-sq.-ft. backroom of the store. This alleviates the pressure on the small store's backroom so that it looks like a normal backroom, where there's nothing above the first upper casepack shelf, no waco has more than one item, a quarter or more of the wacos are empty, etc., instead of having every single waco and every single upper and lower casepack shelf packed tighter and denser than a neutron star from floor to ceiling and beyond. Ultimately, this leads to much better accuracy and better space management (instead of having 48 bike u-locks sitting around for 6+ months, selling at a rate of 1 per week, etc).

Well right around back to school, it seemed like our inventory quadrupled, and we went right back to floor to ceiling sardine packing. It kinda felt like they turned the OPT off or something. Which would be completely insane, because heavy seasonal periods (entire 2nd half of the year...) is EXACTLY when OPT is desperately needed.

Had a group visit the other day. She spent most of the time with me, personally. Put my above thought out there and popped the question. Guess what.

THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THEY ****ING DID. THEY TURNED IT OFF DURING THE MOST IMPORTANT TIME OF THE YEAR. The PRECISE time we need it.

They were wondering why our accuracy had gone to hell, and we've had stuff sitting around for too long.

Yeah....

If they're only going to have it on during the slow time of the year, and turn it off during the busy time of the year...do me a favor, and just don't do me any favors, ok? Thanks.

I'm just really grumpy right now.
 
oh, come on DC's are not "big giant super ultra mega huge square-miles-of-space" mines pretty small. I mean the combined volume of the stock rooms of the stores we service probably exceed our square footage.
 
The store I trained at for TL was an OPT store and I sat in on one of their conference calls with the GOL. Interesting stuff. My store would certainly benefit from it I think. My training store was an extremely backroom-limited store.
 
Strange how many options there are for this kind of thing. OPT, stores with offsite locations (for product and fixtures), multi-level stores, or stores like mine whose backroom is the size of a small volume store.
 
*pats cihyfthedoor on the shoulder & offers him a cold beer*
 
How do stores with offsite locations work?

There are two types, offsite and third-party. I've been both.

Originally we had an offsite warehouse which was basically warehouse space we rented a few miles from the store. We had a long-term rental U-Haul truck and a team of 3-4TMs and a TL who were in charge of taking stuff to and from the offsite warehouse. They set up computers there linked to the corporate network so they could use PDAs (well, actually, this was in the LRT/PDT days...) and have stuff located so we could do location checks from the store. They'd pull hourly batches just like at the store, as well as any other batches that happened to have locations there. If we had a specific pull request for a guest, we had to call them up and have them pull it for the next delivery (we usually did three deliveries a day, assuming they weren't short-staffed). It was very expensive, but worked pretty smoothly.

Eventually we were switched to a third-party system, where we rented space one pallet-slot at a time from another company. We had to palletize anything we wanted to ship, no more than two DPCIs per pallet (we could also send fixtures, but as a best practice it was strongly discouraged), enter it in a logbook with a barcode label, quantity, and a stockroom location label (so the item was located for pulls, etc.), then request a pickup via a web-based form. Similarly, any time we needed something brought back from the warehouse, say because it came up in a pull batch, we'd have to enter the pallet ID from the logbook onto the website and request a delivery. The company would send a truck to pick up new pallets and deliver the pallets we had requested. Every pickup/delivery cost money, every pallet we had there cost us a small amount in daily rent, etc., but it was still cheaper than renting our own space and truck and staffing the process ourselves. Of course, the extra work involved in the pickup/delivery process was ridiculously time-consuming, AP was constantly having to audit it, there were errors regularly... I didn't miss it when we finally dropped far enough in volume to not need it anymore.
 
I miss our offsite (I was the TL there). But that's the point of the OPT process, to eliminate having an offsite; to reduce your inventory level far enough so that you don't NEED an offsite anymore (yeah, turning it off during the heaviest times of the year really promotes that...). I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE having the 3rd party. I can't stand it. They don't give a crap about our stuff, the lead time is horrible, the process is screwed, there's nothing good about it. Except, I guess, the price for corporate. But you know what? You get what you pay for. With the offsite, we could have merchandise and guest pulls back at the store within hours of needing them (although our offsite was almost 15 miles away, we were always going against the flow of traffic, so it was fast). We could send anything over there (sans food, chemicals, electronics, etc), there was far more integrity because we actually care about our merchandise, both retail and non-retail. The payroll didn't change, because all of those team members are back at the store doing the same task with the same hours, because, surprise, our in-store inventory levels rose dramatically because of moving all of the stuff from the offsite over to the store (and let me tell you how accuracy has gone completely to hell because now every single waco has 6-8 dpcis in it as a result).

The worst part is that even though we physically have space to expand our store, which would alleviate our problems, we can't because of shortsighted city codes.
 
Try working in a multi-level store.
 
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