Quote:
Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
If you read the article, their warehouses were so overloaded with stock that they had to rent 3rd party storage lots/yards in order to deal with it. Their business intelligence (lol) was just so screwed up that they just had no idea what was in the boxes, where the boxes were, and what stores needed to be sent to them.
Sounds like a classic case of expensive consulting firms (SAP, Accenture, Retaxia) overselling an incomplete solution/product to a desperate buyer and the classic failure of management and integration to the tune of several billion dollars.
Our company did the same thing last year with an oil & gas marketing system that the consultants/vendor sold on false promises, came in unfinished, failed to work, wasted a million dollars, and everybody went back to spreadsheets and the system was deleted.
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I read the article. They also say the biggest mistake they made was initially spending so much on the property to begin with. The warehouses were also the planned destination of the goods that were to then be distributed to the individual stores.
While I don't dispute that the management was at fault and should have seen things coming, a major issue for them was that they assumed business in Canada would operate like it did in the US.
What allows target to thrive in the US is their ability to provide a vast variety of goods at a reasonable price. Good luck with that in Canada. Nothing is a reasonable price and our access to goods is extremely limited. A major point in the article is the inability to quickly negotiate feasible prices and delivery methods with Canadian suppliers. This is an ongoing issue as many products are controlled by inept companies with absurd distribution licenses.
While the management is obviously at fault for not dealing with those issues prior to the launches, the other issue becomes should those hurdles in Canada have existed in the first place?