Does anyone else never get anything done? The leaders in my store give me so much other stuff to do and it's completely impossible to keep up. I have 2.5 pallets of back signing I've not touched, and the fixture room is awful. I still have CSEs, patio, etc. to do. Even when they give me a day to catch up, I only barely do, and then I'm behind again immediately after.
Protips from a signing specialist of 1 year so far (having gone thru a year's worth of drama).. take these with a heaping helping of sarcasm. I totally love being signing specialist and would do it forever even with really dopey problems =)
(a) I would highly advise going thru every new signing pallet immediately as it comes off the truck if possible, or making it the highest priority of each week to accomplish, even if it seems like nothing else is. Other peoples' orders come on mine, so people may be waiting on things that are inside your pallets. Focus on getting the orders of other people sorted out first, and then deal with your bits. I get a box of black markers and write in large letters along the side what the description on the label is and which date it starts, so the label hunt can be avoided. Also consider making a tub of that week's aisle being set and pushed out to wherever POG is working, so they can dig thru it themselves to set the elements they need, and communicate to each of them directly to their eyeball, "yes, that is on this tub here" and then do your errands you must do, and then later rifle thru whatever they've left over and wrap up the loose ends.
Expect the people who stack signing pallets to have never played Jenga or Tetris ever in their lives (which is incidentally not done at the DC, I have learned.. it is stacked and wrapped by a third-party not directly by any Target person, and travels by what surely must be a road filled with both speed bumps and potholes so that everything gets shifted out of place before it even arrives at the DC, and the DC then loads them onto your store's truck to be delivered to you, making sure they ram it into every upright post along the way before it does actually go in the truck to be sent to you). I have a personal gallery of pallets that are positively mind-boggling, to look back on to when days surely must have been less nightmarish than this one..
(b) Around a year or so after I began, the ETL above me told me I wasn't right for the position and pulled me off, but didn't really do any research as to whether I was actually right for it -- he had a laundry list of things that I had not done, but without approaching me about them. We ended up having a conference with the STL, the ETL, and HR to address them, and I had an answer for every single item, and they were all things like, "it was damaged when it arrived, so I had to order a new one (and here is the receipt), and I can't speed up the mail, there is no other way to not-be-late." Some of the things were petty things like, "Every time I go into the signing area, I find a simple task that has not been done yet," to which I retorted, "If you give me 200 easy tasks to do, and I do one at a time like any normal person can, by the time I have whittled that list down to 60 and am doing one, that means you can find 59 other small things at any given moment that I'm not doing yet. You finding a small thing I haven't done yet doesn't mean anything. You have to completely ignore the other 140 small tasks I did that brought me down to 60, for you to find one of the 59 and then complain about the one. Even if I did the one you found first, there would still be 59 other small tasks still undone for you to moan about. Ask me first, don't just assume I'm slow or lazy." I got put back on, on the basis that I would check in with the ETL weekly to talk about what all I had done, which eventually morphed into me sending him an email each week summarizing what tasks had been completed, what was left, and what I was anticipating next week. I'd consider making yourself a scribbled-down list of what you have done as notes, if you get questioned on something.. Document your progress, if not at least to yourself to be able to see where you are and what's left not only as a reminder, but also as proof. Also include topics you've MySupported, ordered, etc.
(c) Expect HQ to seem like they have no earthly idea what they're doing. I'll get 1-2 weeks of poking around looking for something to do, scrounging up this-and-that, but then suddenly get slammed with 20 projects all due in one day, instead of spreading them out like a sane person would. I am no longer surprised that they will send me 15 vacuums to be assembled, a major seasonal update like Lawn/Patio, plus all of softlines CSE to be set last week, all to arrive with little warning. "Hey signing person, here is a giant pallet of utter codswallop we've decided to drop in your lap suddenly. It will take a lifetime to complete, but it was due 2 weeks ago and you'll only be allowed to work about 25 hours this week. We sent your leadership (but only people not relevant to it) a very obscurely-placed note that it will be delayed arriving by 2 weeks but they won't see or remember it, and just assume that you got it 3 weeks ago and keenly observe that the deadline has passed. Your DTL also did not read/see the note, and is telling your STL that he expects to see the completed project when he arrives tomorrow, to show off to the other stores. If you now need a change of undergarments, please request them via MySupport. Good luck!"
Also expect MySupport to have no idea what you're talking about, and take 2 weeks to reply to something simple.. one memorable one was that the reply back was that the POG my question was about had already been reset -- because they literally took that long to reply, for the next POG to have been set over the top of it. When the CSE assembly project came up, we were completely blindsided by it (on top of maybe 2 other major resets going on at the same time), and I read that it would take 40hrs/wk for *2 people* to complete, and by about 3 days later I was asked why I hadn't finished it yet .__.
(d) Make a Documents folder in the signing PC called Ariba Receipts, and keep all of your SAP order receipts in there. You can technically pull up old receipts from the outer ordering system manually, but it is complicated, tedious, and arranged in a very dumb way. Just saving the receipts as PDF, and name them something like the date and loosely what it is, so you can pull it up with just a simple glance. It may help to email them as attachments to yourself, and keep a 'receipts' folder in outlook, in case the desktop documents randomly get wiped as has happened several times to me without warning.. Having the receipt handy will be easy proof that you ordered something to replace something damaged/etc.
(e) Whenever you get a large amount of displays to put out (baby furniture, lamps, small appl's, etc), on assembly day get a blank sheet of yellow/white adhesive labels and tear them out and then in halves. Write the MDxxxx number, the fixture DPCI, and the actual product DPCI in little on the half, and then stick it somewhere on the display out of view. The next time you have to go back thru them, what the display is will be obvious without having to shuffle POG papers to figure out what is what. This will also help the SFT/etc who sometimes must audit all of the displays behind you randomly, and will impress them that you saved them a bunch of time. The MD/fx/actual numbers should be listed on the box the display came in, so fill out each one as you assemble/detrash them. The small delay for each one will be worth its weight in redcards when time comes to redo them all over again to know very easily which stay and which get junked.
(f) The fixture room will be consistently awful. One DTL+ type got the idea to prevent stores in their cluster from stacking shelves upside down on top of other shelves for fear they could slide off (of a level surface no less) onto someone, effectively halving the amount of space we could store shelves on. For perhaps more than a month we had tubs lined up everywhere waiting to be palletized by people who had no time to do such things, just because a person who doesn't even use the fixture room had a bright idea about how fixture rooms should operate. One store's STL sent photos to this upper leader, of the work their store did in theirs to get it spotless and organized, and then that DTL+ type forwarded them around to everyone else saying this was the expectation. In the logs of the email header, I found out which store it was and emailed their signing specialist asking what in particular they did for x y and z, and the SS there said they had nothing to do with it -- all of the TL's in the store worked overnight one or two times to get it that way. I told my STL that if this store was such a great example to emulate, that we should also copy their technique for getting it done. Nope, still all dumped on me. "Hey, why are these 30,000 things not done yet. I gave you 2 extra hours last week, isn't that plenty? They all seem so simple." I think my eyes have rolled so far up that they've come back around again.
(g) Whenever you are out of town if you ever are, visit another Target and visit their fixture room and talk to their signing specialist. Chances are they will be exasperated also and will finally have someone to find relief in, having no other person to share their stress who has any idea what they're talking about. I've done this a couple times and both of us tend to walk away from the exchange very relieved =)
