Will this work? (Question for receiving people)

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Corporate has cooked up a new process for unloading trucks. It rolls out next week. From what I can tell, it is similar to the unload process used by Target and probably other retailers as well.

We will be getting an extra person to help unload trucks. This person will scan the barcode on every box as it comes down the conveyor belt. The scanner will identify the box as "fill" or "backstock". The person scanning the boxes will mark them as fill or backstock, and then the unloaders will sort the boxes to an appropriate fill or backstock pallet for each department.

The goal seems to be to reduce the amount of time it take third shift to fill and backstock trucks. Theoretically, it will go faster if we don't have to open a box to fill only one of the item inside. These boxes will be considered backstock and won't be sent to the floor to be filled.

This seems like something that will work very well if the truck unloaders know what they are doing. Unfortunately, the truck unloaders at my store are complete retards who can't sort the boxes to the right department half the time, so separating fill and backstock will be one more thing for them to screw up. So I expect it to be a cluster and a lot of aggravation for everybody involved.

Does anybody have experience unloading trucks this way? If so, how did it work at your store?

[Crosshair]

Sounds better than the, "Lets put a 35 lb case of paint on top of the stack in the truck and see if the unloaders at the store notice" system that we have now. (Taking a case of paint to the face hurts.) Though as you say, it will only work if the unloaders know what the heck they are doing and if your inventory system actuay works.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Sounds better than the, "Lets put a 35 lb case of paint on top of the stack in the truck and see if the unloaders at the store notice" system that we have now. (Taking a case of paint to the face hurts.) Though as you say, it will only work if the unloaders know what the heck they are doing and if your inventory system actuay works.

Oh no. The workers at DC will still load the trucks in the craptacualr way they normally do. This only involves unloading.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Let the record show it is now January 26. We began this scanning program in August, I believe.

We have officially abandoned it, and are distancing ourselves from it like schoochildren distance themselves from the puker on a class bus trip. Management says we are not scanning the boxes any more.

Why, you ask? Because the system is completely and totally FUBAR. Half the merchandise that scans as fill and is taken to the salesfloor turns out to be backstock, and merchandise that is marked as backstock and left in the backroom can fit out on the floor. Sometimes these items are completely wiped out on the floor, but the scanner says they get backstocked.

It had gotten so bad we started to bring the backstock pallets out to the floor along with the fill and work through everything as we had before.

We are still going to have a couple extra people on unloads, but none of them will be scanning and marking boxes. They'll just be putting the boxes on pallets, and the unload should go a bit faster.

I breifly wondered if the program was being eliminated at all stores completely, but I guess it hasn't. The function we use to scan the boxes is still in the scanner. I can just see the corporate suits giving birth to livestock if and when they find out we have abandoned the scanning program, but we have had it.

[Crosshair]

Kinda what I thought. Relying on a computer inventory system for such things is very risky and rarely works.

[Becks]

Relying on a computer inventory system for such things is very risky and rarely works.

Sometimes relying on a human for such things doesn't work either.

May I say, "Can't win, don't try"?

[Gurndigarn]

Kinda what I thought. Relying on a computer inventory system for such things is very risky and rarely works.

Sometimes relying on a human for such things doesn't work either.

Yeah, but at least a human can see that he's doing something stupid. Usually after the fact, but nonetheless. And sometimes, he even learns from it.

(It's little details like this that make me shake my head in wonder whenever anyone assumes computers will ever gain true intelligence.)

[Geek King]

Yeah, but at least a human can see that he's doing something stupid. Usually after the fact, but nonetheless. And sometimes, he even learns from it.

(It's little details like this that make me shake my head in wonder whenever anyone assumes computers will ever gain true intelligence.)

A computer will always do exactly what you tell it to do (barring odd hardware errors). My guess is humans not entering their inventories properly. A database is only as good as its updates.