OPU expert to do pth/stowing only

[gracefulfillment]

OPU isn't my department, but I will try since I was trained in the new way yesterday. From what I understand, as soon as you jump into a Grocery Pick, you only have 20 minutes to pick the order AND put it to hold. Unlike the Regular Picks, you'll still have whatever time is left from when the order came in. This is for food safety, I think.

It's 30 mins from scanning the first cold item (so stuff at the beginning like bread and potatoes don't count) to hitting batch complete.

 

[Anelmi]

I had to jump into OPUs today. Really confusing at first. Not a fan of the label coming out before I grab the items from the cart. I did about 3 grocery batches before I got the hang of it.

 

[Rarejem]

The wording is misleading and led our team to a couple of red picks today. Bagging is still part of pick (look at the timer... still running), while stowing is not. IMO this is simply DUMB. Bagging should be part of stowing.

Correction on this... and it makes it a bit wacky.... Stowing IS part of the timer, so if you pick a cart and drop it off to be packed and stowed, the timer is still running and it's on the picker. I hope that gets an update/correction.

 

[DBZ]

Can someone explain the process for those of us who don't have it yet?

 

[Hardlinesmaster]

We did try the dedicated stow person yesterday. It lasted for 2 hours. The opu orders went nuts. All sales floor tms except tech were pulling orders or on backup. Truck was not done. My sd had cut payroll hours this weekend too.

 

[Zxy123456]

It is. The time for a batch starts at 1:30 and keeps going down until the last bag is stowed.

I’ve heard that bagging and stowing are not part of the timer.

 

[lucidtm]

We did try the dedicated stow person yesterday. It lasted for 2 hours. The opu orders went nuts. All sales floor tms except tech were pulling orders or on backup. Truck was not done. My sd had cut payroll hours this weekend too.

Ours is kicking off soon and I'm very curious about what will happen when our OPU's do this over a weekend. Truly out of nowhere we'll be at 1 OPU and then when you're out of it there are suddenly 9 OPU and 5 Grocery. All due at the same times. I'm trying to stay positive because in theory I like the idea... but with no additional payroll to support training or the change on this were screwed with the volume we get.

 

[Flow Trainer]

Everything is still part of the 90 minute timer for orders. Picking, prepping, and stowing still must be done by the time due. But when determining a person's UPH (units picked per hour) which used to include the time it took to put to hold, it now does not. That "timer" ends when the batch is complete. So pick times per hour are going up. But the order is still due by the countdown clock, which means it must be prepped and stowed in that time. And if not, I assume that the overdue batch is attributed to the picker. This is where we have had issues. When it is really busy, they have us just pick a batch, leave it to be stowed, and continue on picking. But when you have 10 to 15 people picking, the backup of carts waiting to be stowed is extreme. And we start running out of carts (like SFS does during 4th quarter). Not sure what the best way to do this is. We never have enough people scheduled to do SFS and OPU's, so who are they pulling to stow the carts? And the system where the label prints first is very confusing as well. Not a fan of this new process at all.

 

[Anelmi]

Also if multiple people are using the same printer then the labels start stacking if you aren’t bagging fast enough and you have to really pay attention that the name on the label matches the name on the order you just bagged.

My store doesn’t have enough TMs to separate the pick and stow process which may be a good thing for accountability and to eliminate errors, idk.

 

[gracefulfillment]

Can someone explain the process for those of us who don't have it yet?

This is how I've explained it to my team. Note that how stores break out each role (pick/prep/stow) will be ASANTS

1) use ePick to pick cart as usual
2) when done picking, it will kick you out like standard does. Go into the fulfillment section in myDay and select ‘put’
3) scan back into the cart
4) scan a printer. A label will automatically print
5) put that label on a bag. Scan items until bag is full
6) place bag into and scan subcart location. Another label will print. Repeat until all orders are bagged/labeled
7) once everything is bagged, you can scan the bag barcodes and then scan a waco to locate them

like rarejem and flow trainer said, pick rates will go up because pick times are only calculated based on pick and not pick AND put times now, but the orders still need to be completed and put to hold before the timer. The timer will be visible while bagging/stowing

 

[Anelmi]

This is made a little bit harder with grocery orders though. You can't just stuff a bag until full and stow. You have to look at the label and see if it has a fridge icon or a snowflake icon to see where to stow.

 

[Rarejem]

This is made a little bit harder with grocery orders though. You can't just stuff a bag until full and stow. You have to look at the label and see if it has a fridge icon or a snowflake icon to see where to stow.

There should be fewer problems with tms stowing in the wrong area this way since you will get an alert if you put it into the wrong place.

 

[DBZ]

So no more favorite cart for an OPU person because they will be dropping it off and taking an empty?

 

[Fluttervale]

We end up bottlenecking around the printers when it is busy so this will help a lot. We were already trying to figure out how to do this for next 4th quarter so this should work out well.

 

[sunnydays]

So no more favorite cart for an OPU person because they will be dropping it off and taking an empty?

worth noting that the single bagger/stower concept is designed for higher volume stores that do 3500 or more units per day

For everyone else it’ll be business as usual just with a slight process change

 

[CAwildFire]

Question, I’m a F&B TL.
my understanding is market will do all orders including dry and cold. Are batches still separate cold vs dry? I’m going to assume so since there is the 30 min for food safety for cold. Or do batches come by order person? i.e Doe, J.
SD says market will NOT hand off to a stow person and we own process from start to finish. Pick/Bag/stow. We also have a separate area from regular OPU hold locations about 50 ft away.
We don’t roll out until next week. No one knows at my store, help please. Ty

 

[DSMCA]

Question, I’m a F&B TL.
my understanding is market will do all orders including dry and cold. Are batches still separate cold vs dry? I’m going to assume so since there is the 30 min for food safety for cold. Or do batches come by order person? i.e Doe, J.
SD says market will NOT hand off to a stow person and we own process from start to finish. Pick/Bag/stow. We also have a separate area from regular OPU hold locations about 50 ft away.
We don’t roll out until next week. No one knows at my store, help please. Ty

Grocery OPUs have dry cold and frozen all in same order with dry being things like bread and produce. The moment you pick your first cold/frozen item that OPU will drop to 30 mins, thats 30 mins for the whole order pick/bag/stow.

Standard OPUs the timer doesnt change when you pick an item and you will have the full hour+ or whatever to pick/bag/stow items but the timer is still for the entire process from picking-stowing.

When you do a grocery order it is best to organize your cart with all cold things together, all frozen together, all dry goods together because when it comes to stowing the app has you do all cold, then all frozen, then all dry. the app will warn you if you're putting an item in the wrong location ie produce in a cooler/freezer (its worth noting you can override this incase you want to say put a cake in a cooler, or alcoholic beverages that are in a cooler)

when it comes to stowing, the app will tell you existing locations for that order so you can try and keep orders all together instead of having orders split up across multiple hold locations.

My store is set up for on our busy days, we will have a designated fulfillment TM to bag/stow OPUs, on non busy days fulfillment team members will pick/bag/stow their own carts.

I hope this helped answer some of your questions.

If anyone has any tips etc on how to make the new process more efficient please share.

 

[versionDefect]

idk the amount of time I see service advocates standing around doing nothing... "we gotta have 3 at drive up in case there is a pop up". Maybe it isn't like this at your store, but it is at mine. It could work. I'm sure it will depend on the store. My old SD would take hours from the checklanes to help GM.

I get this mentality but in the event that drive up gets 3 popups at once there is a guarantee that one of them is alr here but didn't say they were on their way. This is why they need a few people albeit standing there waiting. If there aren't people there and they need to call for backup on drive up by the time someone says they're coming the numbers are already bad.

 

[gracefulfillment]

Had my first day with it today and so far my biggest complaint is being unable to scan multiple bags at a time when stowing. I think that defeats the purpose of bagging everything first if I still have to stow each bag individually.

 

[NotCynicalYet]

Our D/U team is noticing a big increase in bags that just aren't where they say they are (this is a huge time killer).

What about the new process might cause this?

 

[DatBoi9497]

Our D/U team is noticing a big increase in bags that just aren't where they say they are (this is a huge time killer).

What about the new process might cause this?

I know the first 2 batches I did I messed up 3 bags and had put two different labels on the same bag, so I had to look at every bag I was stowing to check if it was right. The new system is completely opposite to the muscle memory I've developed to just do everything on autopilot. Its probably going to be a complete mess for the first week until people adjust to the new workflow. Also it was absolutely ridiculous that Target implemented such a big change and there was no required training for it beforehand, only a short video

 

[DSMCA]

the new system has some good things but overall not that much of a fan after a week of using it.

Thing I like:
cant put things in the wrong location ie fruit in freezer etc,
having 1 or two designated people for stowing means less fulfillment errors in regards to over filling bags etc


things i dont like:
OPU/SFS carts need to be redesigned to work well with this, currently the only way to make them efficient is manually removing a bunch of the dividers so you can put items on one side, and then put them on the opposite side as you bag them, current cart layout means you end up with items/bags mixed together which leads to you spending time sorting things out of the cart that are now sandwhiched in-between bags or having to move items around because bagged items wont fit in the cart the same way as they were before bagging, it helps if you put items in the cart by order or whatever but some orders are so large this isn't always possible

the extra step of taking items off the cart to bag them then put the bags back on the cart wastes time, just give us cart-bag-hold location

cant scan multiple bags from the same order when putting to hold this does two negative things 1. slows things down having to do every bag individually, and 2, when its busy and youre in a rush you cant waist time looking for "existing hold locations" you just put bags in the closest open hold location wheras the old way you scanned entire orders into 1-2 hold locations meaning orders are even more split up now than they ever were under the old system leading to longer drive up times

(i could be wrong but we havent been able to find a way to do it yet) if you scan too many items to a bag, you cant backout and redo the bag, ie if you scan 2 1 liters of water and a box of cereal their all tied to one bag now (this has only been a problem for newer people but still)

for the love of god make the epick app account for the dimensions of the carts and break things up accordingly, so many people tired of getting orders where its "go get 2 25lb bags of dog food, 3 38lb things of cat liter, two cases of water and then oh btw we're gonna need you to pick an air fryer and toaster oven on there before topping it off with 8 kingsize pillows and comforter set" (i know this will never happen and is unrelated to the post but bullseye please 🥺)

 

[Unleashed Dog]

Tried the new process. The Hold and Stow things just feels like in doing twice as much compared to the old process.

But that’s what Myday is all about. Making things more complicated than they need to be.

 

[Zxy123456]

the new system has some good things but overall not that much of a fan after a week of using it.

Thing I like:
cant put things in the wrong location ie fruit in freezer etc,
having 1 or two designated people for stowing means less fulfillment errors in regards to over filling bags etc


things i dont like:
OPU/SFS carts need to be redesigned to work well with this, currently the only way to make them efficient is manually removing a bunch of the dividers so you can put items on one side, and then put them on the opposite side as you bag them, current cart layout means you end up with items/bags mixed together which leads to you spending time sorting things out of the cart that are now sandwhiched in-between bags or having to move items around because bagged items wont fit in the cart the same way as they were before bagging, it helps if you put items in the cart by order or whatever but some orders are so large this isn't always possible

the extra step of taking items off the cart to bag them then put the bags back on the cart wastes time, just give us cart-bag-hold location

cant scan multiple bags from the same order when putting to hold this does two negative things 1. slows things down having to do every bag individually, and 2, when its busy and youre in a rush you cant waist time looking for "existing hold locations" you just put bags in the closest open hold location wheras the old way you scanned entire orders into 1-2 hold locations meaning orders are even more split up now than they ever were under the old system leading to longer drive up times

(i could be wrong but we havent been able to find a way to do it yet) if you scan too many items to a bag, you cant backout and redo the bag, ie if you scan 2 1 liters of water and a box of cereal their all tied to one bag now (this has only been a problem for newer people but still)

for the love of god make the epick app account for the dimensions of the carts and break things up accordingly, so many people tired of getting orders where its "go get 2 25lb bags of dog food, 3 38lb things of cat liter, two cases of water and then oh btw we're gonna need you to pick an air fryer and toaster oven on there before topping it off with 8 kingsize pillows and comforter set" (i know this will never happen and is unrelated to the post but bullseye please 🥺)

Speaking as someone on drive up, this system actually helps us. My flex baggers/stowers are doing a better job of putting all of a guests bags in the same Waco and stowing large items near the Waco where the bags are. This makes my job easier.

 

[gracefulfillment]

(i could be wrong but we havent been able to find a way to do it yet) if you scan too many items to a bag, you cant backout and redo the bag, ie if you scan 2 1 liters of water and a box of cereal their all tied to one bag now (this has only been a problem for newer people but still)

when prepping, if you haven't scanned the bag back into the cart, you can reprint the label and it will make you scan everything again