In an earlier post, I discussed the disparity of man hours set aside for uninterrupted stocking for overnight crew versus block scheduling. In that post, I briefly mentioned the damage this has done to receiving; theorizing that block scheduling has negatively impacted the processing and movement of incoming freight even more than it has done so with stocking.
Prior to block scheduling, I was the lone overnight dock associate in a club that ran a night crew of 8 to 12 people per night, not including the overnight manager. The baseline was 10 stockers each night which is what I used to calculate the man hours per night out on the floor. A portion of that time each night was delegated to putting freight away. With only one person on the dock, it would be otherwise impossible. If I arrived to work and there was a DC already unloaded and stacked on the dock, I would divide it according to section (center, grocery, and hardlines) run it out to the floor and leave it in each of three places for it to be put away. If the pallets were hot, I'd leave them in the area they were shopped from. When there was an open window of time I'd run them to the steel. We had the luxury of being able to read and react. Once the dock was clear I'd get on with whatever came first. If no one was delivering, I'd start emptying the DC that was in the door, pausing whenever frozen/dairy, meat/produce, water, paper, McLane, Coke, or Pepsi arrived. Because the dock was always being perpetually cleared of whatever was coming in, there were no backups. Eight hours was sufficient 90% of the time to get everything done, even after we gave away the ability to schedule the deliveries ourselves by creating the appointments on our end and controlling freight arrivals so that one day wasn't too congested versus another. After auto-scheduling came into effect, it was challenging, but not impossible to stay on top of everything.
Fast forward to now and there is still only one receiver and they only have 3 hours to freely roam the store on their lift. Some nights they receive assistance, some nights it's all on them. If I'm walking in on an already full dock - which is every single afternoon - I'm immediately two hours behind. I can receive the frozen/dairy and run it out with spotters or use an electric jack, which takes three or four times longer than when there are no members in the building. Every evening, though, there is also a paper truck or a water truck or a Coke truck, or even a combination of any two. The fact is, ANY live freight coming in has to be added to what's already on the dock when I arrive and I often am faced with the issue of not having enough room. The only remedy for that is to run freight out to the floor with spotters, which takes three times as long and even longer if the steel is damn near full, which is always the case these days. There's nothing as frustrating as running freight out with spotters, closing aisles while people are trying to shop, and playing Tetris in order to get stuff put way in the steel. The first five hours of my shift - because of all these limitations - doesn't result in creating that much more space on my dock. Once the store closes, there are three hours to get it all cleared out and try and empty one of the other DCs in the door and - these days - we always have 2 or more that haven't yet been touched. When the morning receiver comes in, he has the same predicament.
Because there are only 5 people on the floor on either shift and their time is already used up trying to stock what little they can, receiving is constantly in a state of playing catch up and literally failing to do so at every possible juncture. This problem affects stock levels on the floor, open places in the steel for new freight, and an accumulation of freight on the dock that gets buried and untouched for several days and even weeks at a time. It is a vicious, never-ending cycle that block scheduling only serves to magnify and worsen.
So how are the geniuses in Bentonville going to fix this, if no one from RM on down acknowledges it and communicates these preposterous flaws with this current, doomed operation?