I think these two paragraphs sum up the article well.
It didn’t take long for Target to figure out the underlying cause of the breakdown: The data contained within the company’s supply chain software, which governs the movement of inventory, was riddled with flaws. At the very start, an untold number of mistakes were made, and the company spent months trying to recover from them. In order to stock products, the company had to enter information about each item into SAP. There could be dozens of fields for a single product. For a single product, such as a blender, there might be fields for the manufacturer, the model, the UPC, the dimensions, the weight, how many can fit into a case for shipping and so on. Typically, this information is retrieved from vendors before Target employees put it into SAP. The system requires correct data to function properly and ensure products move as anticipated.
A team assigned to investigate the problem discovered an astounding number of errors. Product dimensions would be in inches, not centimetres or entered in the wrong order: width by height by length, instead of, say, length by width by height. Sometimes the wrong currency was used. Item descriptions were vague. Important information was missing. There were myriad typos. “You name it, it was wrong,” says a former employee. “It was a disaster.”
I found so much more in the article. To quote another poster.. Hubris. The overconfidence of management was shocking. Aggressive schedule drove the system problems quoted above, which were compounded by a lack of training and experience and understanding.
If it was just a set of software glitches, this could be recoverable... But 1.8bn in property investment meant that the show must go on, otherwise the debts would rack up quickly. So, aggressive expansion was the plan - but there was no foundation of experience to build on. Boom! A house of cards.
7 billion debt and no profits until 2021? That was the most telling story to me.
To me, this was largely a consequence of a much earlier bad decision: to lease all the Zellers space. If they had leased a smaller amount, the product dimension issue would have been much smaller in size, and they'd apply their lessons learned at a more manageable rate than having 'data weeks'.
Not only was it too much, it was of low quality. I very rarely went to any Zellers and ended up having a negative association with those I did. When they turned into Targets I still avoided them, never actually stepping foot in any Target stores.
I echo this. I often think of it as an error in branding. They first entered by taking over the space previously held by a company which didn't have a strong brand presence. It was easy to associate the two. I also had never been to a target despite there being two in my relatively small city.
It didn’t take long for Target to figure out the underlying cause of the breakdown: The data contained within the company’s supply chain software, which governs the movement of inventory, was riddled with flaws. At the very start, an untold number of mistakes were made, and the company spent months trying to recover from them. In order to stock products, the company had to enter information about each item into SAP. There could be dozens of fields for a single product. For a single product, such as a blender, there might be fields for the manufacturer, the model, the UPC, the dimensions, the weight, how many can fit into a case for shipping and so on. Typically, this information is retrieved from vendors before Target employees put it into SAP. The system requires correct data to function properly and ensure products move as anticipated.
A team assigned to investigate the problem discovered an astounding number of errors. Product dimensions would be in inches, not centimetres or entered in the wrong order: width by height by length, instead of, say, length by width by height. Sometimes the wrong currency was used. Item descriptions were vague. Important information was missing. There were myriad typos. “You name it, it was wrong,” says a former employee. “It was a disaster.”