The biggest issue with DU is that grocery was handed a bunch of categories on day #1 that they had absolutely no experience or training with. The teams that lost these products stopped caring about their status on day #1. The store team leaders and regional leadership have no concept of what it takes to maintain these items. The few stores that handled DU seamlessly should be awarded global all-star status.
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@EZmC4Sx-9iie - integrating on this scale is not easy and would require a sophisticated IT and business transformation in-house skills which we do not have. We can always go the consultant route but that's very risky and ultra expensive. I hear what you are saying but realistically we'll continue to operate in a fragmented fashion for many many years
Get all of the SKUs in the same classifications in every region. Then we can look at replacing the variety of systems we now have with nationwide systems. For example, many regions like mine use a shoddy PO system called IRMA, but IRMA is not company-wide. Ditch IRMA and its counterparts, and replace them with a nationwide PO system. Ditto for nationwide systems for: Point of sale, receiving, inventory, reporting, and accounts payable. These are long overdue steps to make us better.
Complaining about why didn't they do this crap from the beginning does not help and actually is unrealistic. These people just ended up where they are without being ready for it due to rapid growth and aquisitions in my opinion. And, yes, many of them ended up in more senior positions than their skills and experience would indicate. So lets all try to make things better by not being party to the promoting of TMs that are not worthy. Skills and abilities should be more important than brown-nosing.
How about a new chain: "Clusterf*** by WFM." Oh wait, that's what we are now.
Let me guess, bread is going back to bakery? Wouldn't surprise me a bit. #TeamWFM
As usual, even the most obvious ideas (ONE categorization system for all products across all regions) gets sucked into the black hole of botched regional implementation. This is because the most basic perverse incentive remains: What is it? It's the incentive for individual regions to twist every initiative into a way for its top leaders to rake in even more money, thus screwing up the entire implementation. Step one is to FIRE all regional leaders and put the company under one unified authority. Why can't the board of directors and the e-team see what is right under their noses? The inmates are running the asylum! It's pure folly to ask the people who would lose their overpaid privileged positions (and their bonuses etc) to be the ones implementing the very changes that would result in their elimination! DUH!!!
There will be business classes taught based on this company. "What you should never do in business".
@3edb- Good post. From what I understood about it, the data unification was supposed to be better than it actually was. We were supposedly going to be able to look up any item that is carried in any store across the company. For example, something South region carries but Florida doesn't might be available since UNFI east serves both. Would have been nice for special orders or for (gasp!) making some of our own buying decisions at the store level. But that never happened. I'd say the DU was part global necessity and part regional boondoggle. The changes have trashed the sales of entire categories of products, and surely many more have just slipped through the cracks. Much like many of our other big "global initiatives", the project is only half-done, half-baked and half-assed.
Apparently many are unaware of why the DU (Data Unification) occurred...
WFM needs to get all systems uniform and the same across the company if we are to have things we really need like automated replenishment buying (where the sale at the register creates the reorder), and maybe even online retail sales (imagine Whole Body products sold online, for example.) Right now we have different systems in different regions. We can't even run a company-wide sales report to see how a big sale did last week! We have to run a report on each system and then add the reports together, which is just stupid. (Lets say I was a produce big cheese at Global and I was wondering how the one day mango sale did yesterday: our current setup does not allow me to easily have this information.) We need the whole company using one system for POS (point of sale, meaning our cash registers), one system for receiving, one system for ordering, one system for inventory, etc etc. To have the entire company using the same system for everything like this then the products need to be on the same subteam everywhere. You can't have teas in GROC in one region and in WBOD in another. You can't have coffee in SPEC in one region and in GROC in another, etc etc. Everything has to be classified the same everywhere for data purposes so the computers can do their thing for us, hence the need for a data unification, to make everything UNIFORM, get it? This has not been some mid-level management boondoggle, it is a top level IT sort of thing for computer technology reasons. If we are ever going to have much needed replenishment buying then we need to get everything uniform across the company from a data perspective (and yes that means less buyer positions but we need to do it to be competitive especially as we grow larger.) It seems to have been handled poorly in many areas of the company which does not surprise me as my experience is that our regional offices are loaded up with nitwits and mistakes are just nonstop. Oh, don't get me started... Sales have been crushed for a lot of these moved products in some regions and some products may get moved again, but it will still have to be uniform across the company: this item I am holding in my hand needs to be on the same team in every store in the company. If our company is going to grow and prosper, we need to be more efficient. And we need to make less mistakes (that means you bozos higher up, ya' hear?) Success means more opportunity for those of us who plan to be here long term. I hope they can do it, because I don't want to go start over somewhere AGAIN!
What leadership did was use the realignment to reduce the ratio "Selling, general and administrative expenses as a percentage of sales." Wow, you mean it didn't work? That's because putting the cart before the horse never has accomplished anything except making the person doing it look like an ass.
This is a no-brainer. Someone has to do the work. Describing how our inept management calculates labor versus doesn't solve the problem. Again, someone has to do the work. Yes, if you take a snapshot of additional sales one second before the change, additional sales are zero. For a time, grocery enjoys a free ride off what has already been accomplished by specialty. But then from the moment of opening on the day of the change, grocery has picked up responsibility for a high-learning curve product category (coffee and coffee accessories) with numerous vendors. It's high maintenance. So whether or not management accepts it, someone needs to do the work involved in researching, ordering, merchandising and selling that product. Let's say that task took the coffee specialist an average of 30 hours per week. The idea that 30 hours of work can just evaporate but the job still gets done is irrational, nonsensical fatuous BS. Management can calculate the labor any way it wishes, but the fact remains that at least 30 hours (more, really, if the person has no experience with coffee) must be assigned to a warm body because the coffee fairy isn't going to magically appear and get the job done. The goal of the realignment was SUPPOSEDLY to have the same teams do the same things in every region. Very laudable. But management used it as an opportunity to cut labor from specialty and not add it to grocery. And the monkey throws the feces and the tumbleweeds blow down the aisles.
No shit talking here. You just made the case that you do not understand how labor works. More sales does equal more available labor dollars .Labor percentage and labor dollars are different .
@EZmC4Sx-uqg According to your logic and bad attempt at shit talking, have you considered that sales would be higher for a department who received more products from the sub-team alignment, thus meaning they need more labor money? Kthx.
This corporation is absolutely schizophrenic. #TeamWFM
Hey EZmC4Sx-uqg it's good to know that we can just add more job duties with no additional labor. Let's just staff our perishables warehouses that way and watch the food rot. You must be in management.
The realignment was a wholly unnecessary waste of time, money and resources designed to make some manager look he/she was "doing something." But that's okay because VP Stephen could forward the messages. I want a job where all I do is forward emails from Global down the store level in one region and get paid like $250k. Then, when those instructions are carried out and the whole plan fails, I can forward all the emails demanding that the region go back to the old way. Unconscious capitalism at work.
EZmC4Sx-uqg: In our world you're correct, and THAT'S the problem. Obviously, if job duties increase, SOMEONE HAS TO DO THE WORK. Otherwise why not just cut each department to two TMs and be done with it? If management only uses a flat percentage of sales to arrive at the labor budget, that results in a death spiral. The problem with this approach is what I saw at several coffee bars. Labor percentage is set way too low. Wait times increase, order accuracy suffers, the creamer and other coffee condiments aren't refilled so the half-and-half is empty (leading to more immediate demands for condiments, further slowing orders), tables aren't cleared, customers waiting for gelato aren't served, and people walk away in abject frustration. Result: LOWER SALES. So what happens in a straight percentage allocation? Labor gets automatically cut. Moral of the story: You can really save on labor if you close the bloody store and go out of business. Then you won't have to spend a dime on labor. Maybe YOU don't know as much as you think.
Labor percentage does not increase because job duties become more...more sales equals more labor dollars...perhaps you do not know as much as you think 😄
My favorite part of all the realignments was asking store leadership why the labor budget wasn't increasing for grocery due to the extra amount of labor and buying we had to do. Their responses?
"Just figure it out as you go"
We lost many good team members who either became scapegoats or left because of all the bs.
Coffee going back to Specialty? The entire category realignment was one of the dumbest decisions made by management. Here we are (if this holds some substance) just over a year later, going back to basics. A typical example of sheer mismanagement in this company. Waste resources, waste time, waste money, waste food resulting in losing valued employees.