Archived Pfresh Order

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Cel

Jack of All Trades
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Nov 16, 2013
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Some background: Been with Target a bit over 2 months now, was hired shortly before seasonal hiring began at our store. Officially a Hardlines TM but I've sorta become the jack of all trades guy around the store. Wind up doing shifts for everything from cart attendant/softlines/seasonal flexing, and obviously, a lot of Market shifts. I'm not a PA, but both of the PAs at our store have told me that I basically know how to do 90% of what they do at this point. We're a lower volume store (not ULV far as I know, not sure of the exact grading). Usual FDC truck has 1 pallet each of freezer/dairy/produce/meat/ambient with occasional doubles. Anyway, long story short both of our PAs are out tomorrow, so market is just our CTL opening and myself closing, and it's an order day. Talked to the CTL and because of the timing (order has to be done by 6:30 PM but better to do relatively close to that so we have the best possible picture of stock) I'll be doing the order for the first time tomorrow.

I watched the PA trainer do the order on Sunday and got some basic instructions on it (which app, generally which stuff is included, check dates and estimate based on truck arrival day and such whether we need to order, previous QMOS numbers, etc.), and the CTL is going to go over ordering turkeys with me in the ~20-30 mins our shifts overlap, but if anyone could provide some more detail/a guide for it I'd really appreciate it. Tried checking the guide forum and some of the linked pfresh threads but didn't see anything about the order process itself.

Thanks!
 
When it comes to ordering, there really isn't a right or wrong way to do it. I'm sure your trainer went over the application with you, but just to touch base again: when you scan an item to order (Order PF Perishables in web apps), you'll be brought to a screen that tells you what you what you're forecasted to sell, what you're expected to QMOS (for highly perishable items), what you have on order, and what you have on hand. The system takes your forecast, QMOS, on-order and subtracts that from your on-hands to give you your recommended order. Usually, this formula is fairly accurate and you shouldn't need to stray too far outside of the guardrail very often. You'll also be able to see what this week's price was, next week's price, and the casepack size. I believe bananas are the only item without a guardrail. We usually order 80% green, and 20% yellow at our store. If you need to order outside of the guardrail, it gives you 3 exception codes to choose from to complete your order: forecast, quality, and on-hands. If you have to go outside of the guardrail, it's not a huge deal. The order is scored, and I believe you have to be between 90-99% be green (I may need to be corrected on that), but with the elimination of the food business partners, I'm not sure how big of a deal that metric is anymore. Usually, as long as you can speak to what you're doing, you'll be okay. Beef (268-02), chicken (268-05), and most lettuces (I think department 211-03) are no longer store-orderable and are replenished by HQ.

But really, the best tool you have when ordering is yourself. You know better than anyone or anything else what you're selling, what you're throwing away, and what you can't get out of your backroom no matter what you do. The PDA also won't account for the freshness of the product that you have, which is why its important to walk your coolers before you order to take a mental inventory and get a visual idea of what you have. For example, let's say you have 3 casepacks of porkchops on hand, but you're only forecasted to sell 1. The PDA will give you a guard rail of (0-1), with a recommended order of 0. However, what it doesn't know is that all 3 of those casepacks are going to expire the day after your truck, which will leave you with an out for that product if you go with the PDA and choose not to order it. In this case, you might want to order outside of the guardrail with the exception code of "quality" to make up for what you're throwing away. However, it should also be noted that if you have 3 full casepacks of porkchops sitting in the backroom that are due to expire, this is also telling you that these are probably being over-ordered, and can probably be cut back on. I know at my store meat does not sell very well, except for ground beef and sale items.

Essentially, as long as you account for instocks, and QMOS during your order, you'll be okay. I hope this helped a little bit! Do you have any other questions?
 
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Very helpful, thank you! I'll let you know how it went.
 
Went pretty well. I feel like I probably over-ordered produce by a bit, but that's probably just me being a nervous first-timer. I only went outside the guardrails on 1 item (MP frozen turkey breasts) which the system said we had 50 lbs worth and we had 0, and I had like 10 people ask about. Plus my CTL and another PA who happened to be shopping at the start of my shift and I were talking about it and we basically decided on 6 cases.

Didn't order much of any meat otherwise since everything store orderable was pretty full with post-Sunday dates. Wish we could still order chicken since there were a couple outs there. One caused by the flow team who stocked chicken tenders behind chicken breasts, resulting in tenders getting a gray sticker and me finding the tenders basically at expiration. Threw a $2 TPC coupon on there until close but no dice.

Thanks for your help!
 
Awesome, way to go! You can always TPC what you have too much of, so no worries there. Glad it went well!
 
As an update since tonight was my first shift since doing the order (first contiguous 2 days off since...October?), ran into my CTL and a PA as I was clocking in and according to them I did great. A couple small hiccups but overall went really well. Thanks for the help!
 
Thanks. Bit worried today to be honest. We took an early truck that had pretty much 0 store orderable produce (just bagged salads and baby carrots, and some garlic bulbs) this afternoon and I asked the CTL whether I should order heavy or what and he said something to the effect of "maybe just some bananas and grapes for the practice"

Soooo I start doing stand alone research, checking the coolers, checking the pallets and realize we're terminally low on practically everything store-orderable. I literally had guests walk out the store with the last limes, avocados, sweet onions, lemons, blueberries, strawberries, red grapes, 3 lb clementine bags, honeycrisp bags, russet potato bags, celery, I could go on. So I did my research and got the counts correct, then ordered within the guardrails and took pretty much all of the recommendations, trying to err on the lighter side... But I ended up ordering a LOT.

So now I'm second guessing myself after an 11 hour shift, worrying that I ordered way too much and maybe my CTL knew something I didn't about more produce on the way or a better time to place the order. I dunno.
 
Over ordering is always better then under-ordering... I am a PA and this seems to be our motto.. When it comes to food it is true it is better to have, than to have not... Our Thanksgiving Turkey Forecast? prolly 60 cases total throughout all order forecasts combined.. We ignored them and got 160, We stand now on Christmas day with a grand total of 0.
 
still have about 20 boxes of turkeys in the freezer, but 0 spiral hams... we sold about 200 spiral hams this year !!
 
We still have a pallet of turkeys chillin' in our freezer (pun may or may not be intended). Mostly the MP turkeys, and the cook-in-bag ones are what's left. We weren't Pfresh last holiday season so we ordered pretty heavy on everything to be safe since we didn't have anything to go off of. Next year we'll probably just go big on the MP breasts and the Butterballs and get everything else as needed. I'm thinking once the price cut on them ends on January 4th, we're just going to QMOS them out and donate the whole pallet just to get them the hell out of the store. I'm sure they're going to go Dcode pretty soon anyways, right?
 
No, turkey's just go off planogram...we held onto a pallet of butterballs all year last year because our stl was a moron and ordered a million turkeys AFTER Christmas. We donated a whole pallet of MP but hung on to the BB's until this year.

This year, we were okay on our ordering but we got PUSHED a crap ton of BB's so we have about 2 pallets now. Eeeek...
 
Our turkey ordering was mostly well thought out, except that we underordered by a bit so there were only a few MP breasts and cook in bags by Xmas eve morning. Apparently last year we ended up QMOSing a bunch in June because of freezer burn.
 
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