
How Target failed in Canada - diego_moita
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/
======
rickdale
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.” _

~~~
refurb
Would the width x length x height measurement even matter? It's still the same
shaped box.

I guess if boxes could only be stack standing up it might matter.

~~~
kevan
For shipping I don't think it would matter much but for in-store displays it
helps to show the front of the box to customers.

~~~
jacquesm
Indeed, shelf face space is the most precious commodity to a retailer.

------
kyllo
_Complicating matters was the dummy information entered into the system when
SAP was set up. That dummy data was still there, confusing the system, and it
had to be expunged_

Testing in production, good job.

Sounds like a typical systems integration fail, IT incompetents trying to hook
up SAP, JDA, Manhattan, and NCR with no clue how much time and money it really
takes to assemble such a complex systems infrastructure, and getting fleeced
by consultants in the process.

~~~
charlesism
"IT incompetents trying to hook up SAP"

The major incentive for SAP is to drive customers to their consultants. It's
basically designed to be impossible for anyone else to maintain, or use.

Target should have modified their American in-house system instead, where the
incentives align with Target running smoothly.

------
faitswulff
> _A small group of employees also made an alarming discovery that helped
> explain why certain items appeared to be in stock at headquarters but were
> actually missing from stores. Within the chain’s replenishment system was a
> feature that notified the distribution centres to ship more product when a
> store runs out. Some of the business analysts responsible for this function,
> however, were turning it off—purposely._

 _Business analysts (who were young and fresh out of school, remember) were
judged based on the percentage of their products that were in stock at any
given time, and a low percentage would result in a phone call from a vice-
president demanding an explanation. But by flipping the auto-replenishment
switch off, the system wouldn’t report an item as out of stock, so the
analyst’s numbers would look good on paper. “They figured out how to game the
system,” says a former employee. “They didn’t want to get in trouble and they
didn’t really understand the implications.”_

I think this article, and the employee quoted here, works too hard to excuse
immoral behavior in their junior business analysts.

~~~
SixSigma
For me it is the fact that they receive punishment for stock outs, especially
in a company in such trouble!

Why would you only look at stock amount and not stock turn. I would be
concerned at "in stock, sold zero".

This whole story is a clusterfuck.

"We are going to have a new product, it ships on June 1st, no matter how ready
it is" has never been a wise choice.

------
DIVx0
I live in Minneapolis and Target is a huge presence here amongst just about
every type of professional. Everyone knows someone who works(ed) at Target
corp and from catching anecdotes from various people it became clear it was no
secret that Target Canada was in bad shape from the beginning.

This failure not only damaged the careers of many Canadians but also
irrevocably damaged the professional lives of people in my town who were laid
off. While the job market in Minneapolis is fairly good it became a struggle
for some of these newly jobless Target folks to find work in town because of
the massive white collar layoffs.

Target should have been successful in Canada, all of the problems in this
article are linked to over the top pressure and hubris.

------
canistr
My thought is that because Target's downfall was really location. Zellers got
significantly worse and worse over the years that eventually, people stopped
shopping there and took their business elsewhere. As a result, Zellers only
existed in dead-end malls with low foot traffic because the majority of people
went to Walmart.

Target decided it was a good idea to buy up all the Zellers locations and put
their stores in there. But by that time, people's habits changed. Target
wasn't going to revive dead malls.

~~~
tjl
That's not entirely true. I know that Target in Waterloo was in one of the
major K-W malls that gets a lot of traffic. Even still, the few times I
shopped at the Target, it was dead.

------
the_unknown
I loved my local Canadian Target store while it existed. Probably for some of
the reasons it eventually went out of business...

Target was always easy to shop at - nobody else was there - I could walk down
any aisle and not have to deal with other people getting in my way.

Fresh food delivered from the local Sobey's distribution centre (at least I'm
pretty sure that's where it came from). And nobody else pawing through it
before I chose what I wanted.

Somewhat unique stuff - sure they had all the same mass-produced junk that
WalMart did - just slightly different. So it was basically the same but just
different enough to be say "Ha! I'm unique"

Good prices - I know people were always complaining that WalMart was cheaper
but that wasn't necessarily true. Target had some good deals as well. And if
you combined your Target shopping with an occasional trip to Costco you were
pretty well covered.

~~~
jhou2
This was my experience too. I enjoyed shopping at my local Canadian Target.
Clean aisles, brightly lit. Well priced, good quality. Superior experience to
Walmart, Canadian Tire, or Loblaws. Sad when they exited the market.

------
dghughes
When Target opened in my town I went in to see what they had for men's
clothing and walked out five minutes later. Nothing.

There were piles of clothing for (obviously) teen girls, a lot for women and
boys but for men there was nothing. I'm in my 40s I have no interest dressing
like a 15 year-old.

Overall choice for everything else was very limited and the prices were higher
than the previous store there (Zellers). Some people who went to Target in the
USA said the choices in Canada were very limited and prices were double for
the same items.

I bet millions were spent on renovating the local store here alone since it
was pretty grungy before Target took it over.

Worse is when Target took over they were the anchor store and demanded all the
little kiosks in the main route of the mall be closed. No sunglasses huts,
engraving, tobacco or lottery booths either since rumour was Target is
owned/started by a fundamentalist religious family(?). Target put a lot of
small stores of of business before they even opened the Target store causing a
lot of hurt feelings in a small town.

~~~
Grishnakh
>since rumour was Target is owned/started by a fundamentalist religious
family(?).

I think you might be confusing them with Hobby Lobby, the company that went to
the US Supreme Court so they could deny contraceptive coverage in their
employees' health insurance plans. I won't set foot in a Hobby Lobby now.

With them closing the kiosks, that just sounds like your typical dick
corporation move, to try to shut down competition and drive up traffic in
their store.

~~~
wtbob
> I think you might be confusing them with Hobby Lobby, the company that went
> to the US Supreme Court so they could deny contraceptive coverage in their
> employees' health insurance plans. I won't set foot in a Hobby Lobby now.

They didn't deny contraceptives; they denied (what they believe to be)
abortaficients. Big difference.

~~~
mikeash
That's not so much a difference as it is an elaboration. The original
statement is true, the incorrect belief about how contraceptives work merely
explains why.

~~~
wtbob
> The original statement is true, the incorrect belief about how
> contraceptives work merely explains why.

No, because they are fine with contraceptives which they don't believe are
abortaficients. A contraceptive prevents conception (hence the name); other
drugs, devices or procedures end lives (whether by preventing implantation or
directly killing the fœtus). I think that several of the things they believe
are abortaficients aren't, and that there's decent science behind that, but I
also can't blame them for not trusting folks who don't apparently care about
the distinction between something which prevents contraception and something
which prevents implantation.

I also don't think that an employer should be made to pay for the health care
of employees in general. I eat more than I ought; my health is worse than it
should be. Who should foot that bill which results from my choices: my
employer or myself?

~~~
mikeash
I'm well aware of the difference between contraceptives and abortifacients.

If you want to correct the original, the correction would be that they oppose
_some_ contraceptives. The fact that they oppose them based on ignorance about
how they work is, again, not a correction but merely an elaboration.

------
Tiktaalik
Here's my anecdote.

It was late November after Target had been open for a while. I popped in to
look for Christmas stuff and I was blown away by the quality. All of their
decorations and trees were dramatically better in quality than the usual cheap
garbage found at Canadian Tire and Walmart. I was super impressed. I was on my
lunch break and I didn't have a lot of time, so I decided I'd come back on a
weekend to pick up some things.

I show up again next week in the first week of December with my friend,
because he was looking to buy an artificial tree, and I was shocked to find
out that they were basically sold out of all trees. They still had some
decorations but not a lot. I couldn't understand it. How on earth do you run
out of Christmas trees in the first week of December? I asked this to a young
guy who was working there and he just shook his head in disappointment. He'd
clearly been hearing a lot of this.

Their logistics were completely messed up.

------
joneholland
> SAP, Accenture

I'm surprised they opened at all.

~~~
charlesism
Nonsense, SAP is great.

All Target needed to do is G42 their VV6s into a bunch of CC5 subtables. Then
they'd have been free to JK8 the W1 data to an F123098 batch, and...
abracadabra, Y29 reports for the whole company!

Hmm, wait a moment. I think that should be G420, not G42. Let me call my
consultant, and I'll get back to you.

~~~
somedangedname
"RPCEWGJ2 is a standard Executable ABAP Report available within your SAP
system (depending on your version and release level)...If you would like to
see the full code listing simply enter RPCEWGJ2 into the relevant SAP
transaction such as SE38 or SE80"

Found some documentation on Google - I thought you were joking :(

~~~
charlesism
I like their use of "simply" in that sentence.

~~~
chris_wot
What I love about SAP is that the only way to work in it is to be trained
inhouse at the cost of literally tens of thousands of dollars.

Even _Oracle_ lets you install their database for free to figure out how to
use it. You'll never get that chance with SAP. Is it any wonder SAP analyst
get paid so much money? I'd say it's not just for their expertise, it's
because SAP have sewn up the market.

------
mabbo
> what emerged is a story of a company trapped by an overly ambitious launch
> schedule, an inexperienced leadership team expected to deal with the biggest
> crisis in the firm’s history, and a sophisticated retail giant felled by the
> most mundane, basic and embarrassing of errors.

Big-bang launches aren't just bad in software. Imagine if they had opened one
store, and then iterated on it until they got it right. Then a second store,
maybe a third, and slowly spread out. They'd have built a successful
organization in 5 years rather than one that collapses after 2.

~~~
joezydeco
_" Imagine if they had opened one store, and then iterated on it until they
got it right"_

They couldn't launch just one store. That was the root cause of everything
according to the article.

Target Canada took over the leases on all that real estate at once - it was
costing them money to leave those stores empty. That's what drove the insane
schedule.

~~~
mabbo
They didn't have to buy all those leases. That was their choice, they're
decision for how to run the project. And that was their downfall.

~~~
teh_klev
The leases were more or less all from the same company so it's most likely
they got a deal for taking them all at once:

Fourth paragraph:

 _" Under Steinhafel, the company paid $1.8 billion for the leases to the
entire Zellers chain in 2011"_

Also later we read that Walmart were sniffing around the same real estate:

 _Walmart approached him and offered to buy the Zellers chain from HBC. Baker
realized there was more value to Zellers’ real estate than to the operation
itself, since Walmart had soundly beaten the brand. An astute deal maker,
Baker and his team reached out to Target to stoke the company’s interest._

And they'd planned for a fast entry into the Canadian retail market:

 _But the company had previously decided it wanted to grow as quickly as
possible if it were to enter Canada, rather than pursue a slow, piecemeal
expansion. The challenge was in acquiring enough real estate to make that
possible. The Zellers sale provided just such an opportunity._

And all because they thought they really could do this:

 _But Steinhafel may have felt justified in making such a bold move. In the
three years since he was appointed CEO, he’d boosted revenue 8.3%—not a huge
number, but an impressive one, considering the U.S. was experiencing the worst
recession since the Great Depression. Steinhafel had joined Target in 1979,
and his entire professional career had been spent with the company. Target
experienced steady growth during that time, and Steinhafel had simply become
accustomed to succeeding. “The company had never really failed before,” says a
former employee who worked in both the U.S. and Canada. There was no reason to
think Target wouldn’t be able to pull this off._

~~~
sergers
Seems walmart is buying up some of these failed target leases.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-to-buy-13-former-
tar...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-to-buy-13-former-target-
canada-stores-and-a-distribution-centre-1.3066182)

2 of these locations are within 20km of me, and not too far from 3 other
walmarts within 20 minutes apart.

------
giarc
Here is my anecdotal reason why Target failed.

Target missed the boat by about 15-20 years. I entered 4 or 5 different Target
locations in Canada and none of them had a full grocery selection. Targets
were basically Walmarts before they began converting to full grocery stores.

Therefore, shoppers had the option to either go to a Walmart Superstore and
get everything they needed, or go to Target and get 80% of what you needed,
the remaining 20% being available at a grocery store.

Beyond all the data logistics issues, Target would have never succeeded in my
opinion as they couldn't compete with Walmart on selection (or Great Canadian
Superstore for that matter).

~~~
freebasedgirl
The problem I found is in the US there is a class system of those who despise
Walmart as being for the "commoners". In Canada the stigma is much less to
non-existent. Walmart pays more, has the same insurance for all its employees,
and does not actively promote "anti-union" videos to new hires.

~~~
67726e
I wouldn't even say commoners. Walmart has a reputation for having very
trashy, uncouth people walking about. The employees at Target also seem a bit
friendlier, whereas Walmart probably scrapes.the bottom of the barrel for its
employees. My mother has been the weekend manager at a Walmart for 30 years
and it's a real shit-show keeping staff because most are incredibly unreliable
and don't give a damn about their job.

~~~
bozo1979
Walmart in Canada is much, much nicer than in the US. In the US, we almost
never went to Walmart and preferred shopping at Target. When we moved back to
Canada, we initially were delighted that there was now a Target store in our
area. We had horrible experiences and it turned us off completely.

I feel really bad for the people who lost their jobs.. for young people in
their first job, it might be okay. For older folks who probably quit a job
some place else, it is really a hard experience.

Walmart stores in Toronto that I visited, definitely seemed crowded with long
check outs. Other cities in Ontario, the checkouts seem to be adequately
staffed. I'm surprised how different Walmart Canada is from the US operation!

------
hluska
I don't think that Target spent enough time researching Canada. Perhaps if
they had hired some Canadian executives, the result would have been different.

My favourite example has to do with winter hats. In Canada, we call them
toques (it is not pronounced 'toke'), yet in Target, all the signage said
'hats'.

That sounds really small, but it was my most memorable example of a company
that genuinely did not get Canadians. They treated us like Americans and,
while Americans are cool, we aren't Americans!!

~~~
sergers
tuques are a type of knitted hat usually, not specific to winter.

them generalizing a section including tuques as hats is correct, i dont think
i have seen a "tuques" section in any canadian store, they would be in the hat
section.

toques are hardly a canadian thing, and alot of canadians refer to them as
beanies.

target did not fail cause they werent canadian enough(is anything really
canadian?), they failed due to locations, business model, inventory, and
technical issues on their backend.

if anything they failed because they werent "american" enough, as canadians
were expecting a similar experience to USA target shopping

~~~
sandworm101
>> is anything really canadian?

Yes. Many things. Watch TV? Vancouver? Nickleback? Or drake? Or pretty much
1/3 of Hollywood? Canada and canadians are very over-represented in US
culture. They are just hard to spot.

Cruz 2016 -

~~~
jessaustin
Well Nickelback is obviously Canadian, but that third of Hollywood you're
talking about tries very hard to blend in.

------
skywhopper
This failure could have been predicted with a simple understanding of
Systemantics, one of the precepts of which is:

A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to
make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics)

------
fatjokes
OOC, Why do people shop at Target instead of Walmart? For me, the only reason
is distance---if there's a Target closer than a Walmart. Otherwise the two are
pretty much interchangeable.

~~~
Spooky23
Where I live, Walmart is like DMV.

You need to avoid going there at the beginning of the month, after work,
Saturday afternoon, Sunday night, after 9 etc. There's either 2/30 lines open,
or 15/30 with 300 people waiting.

If you go, they don't merchandise. They cut the top off a box of food and
throw it on the shelf. The workers suck because the workplace sucks.

Target, the prices are same or better, selection is different (i.e. You can't
get car parts or hunting gear), and the staff is much more useful.

~~~
protomyth
"You need to avoid going there at the beginning of the month"

Yes, Walmart is the preferred vendor if you are on EBT and that is why police
departments will stake them out at the beginning of the month. Walmart is
pretty much the place to get the most food for the buck.

~~~
Spooky23
They also do fee based bank like services.

I don't care about that at all, it's just that Walmart doesn't bother to do
things like have more staff available.

------
Negative1
I was living abroad in Canada at the time and when Target showed up I was
super psyched. I was the only one.

I think it's easy to blame the horrible and run down locations they took over
from Zellers but people still shopped at Walmarts in similar places. In the
end, it felt like the same experience we had with Amazon (or Netflix) in
Canada; the shell is there with some good products but mostly lacking in
everything that makes Target a fun (and addictive) place to shop. The lack of
products didn't help but that had more to do with Quebec's super bizarre
language police/laws.

The irony is Target Canada was at least slightly better than Walmart Canada
and many MANY times better than Canadian Tire, a place that was almost always
packed with people.

It's sad but I don't think Target ever had a chance in Canada.

------
mkrfox
That data goofiness issue is pretty much use case #1 for Mechanical Turk. Pay
a bunch of people a few cents to do a sensibility check on the data, collect
10 for each item, and put any that are less than 100% through another round.

Not even all that expensive. 10 cents each, 75,000 items, 10 checks each.
$75,000 is quite a bargain for that kind of data validation.

It'd take a day or two.

(There's probably some horrible flaw with this idea)

~~~
retroafroman
There's no real way a turker would know if the data is bad. Really only the
merchandiser at HQ who was checking with the supplier would have had the
source data (dimensions, units for those dimensions, case quantities, and so
on) or warehouse workers who actually receive the product and can physically
look at it. Suppliers sometimes change product attributes, quantity per case
or pallet, or packaging without giving advance notice so the warehouse often
ends up making these updates as they notice them, if they do. Data quality in
supply chains is a constant struggle for many companies. It sounds like Target
got hit bad with this due to a perfect storm of poorly trained merchandisers
and SAP having dummy data that probably looked somewhat reasonable to the
untrained eye.

~~~
cwilkes
Some of their issues were with the measurement system (English vs metric) and
order of dimensions (length * width * height or width * length * height).

I can see a turk system where they show a picture of the product and ask if
the unit of measurement looks correct (being 2.5x off is pretty easy to guess)
and if the order looks correct. They might not get the width and the length
correct but the height could probably be guessed. Course that can probably be
done with computer vision.

So for $75k they could get it so at least the product would fit on the
shelving units. That could easily pay for itself in a day. Products that
failed these two simple tests should be looked at more closely for other
issues.

~~~
retroafroman
True, but again, that assumes they have a picture of the data. If the product
was sold online through target.com, a picture may exist somewhere. Otherwise,
most company's item master data tables (that I've seen) don't include a
picture. Also, they chose not to use data out of the old systems, because they
wanted to avoid getting it out of the old and into the new system. This seems
like it should've been the easier route but for whatever reason their legacy
software probably made it much more difficult than needed.

------
skylan_q
Most everyone I asked about it's failure said that they just didn't get
Canada. It acted as it Canada was a 51st state.

The lack of inventory didn't help either. The one closest to me had about
10,000 options for bath mats and bath robes. Everything else was out of stock
and the food section had limited selection and higher prices than other nearby
stores.

------
sergers
i went to the target a handfull of times in canada. most targets were in old
zellers locations...

when they opened, they seemed like a bit more modern and cleaner zellers, but
still in the same not so high traffic crappy locations. the zellers theme was
red, so was target...

people were excited about target opening based off experiences crossing the
border and shopping at USA Target.

the USA stores differed from the Canadian stores. 1)canada target didnt have
the same selection/inventory of products. 2)prices were significantly
different... even when factoring in the exchange rate, it was still cheaper to
shop at USA target locations on a trip across the border.

walmart here, atleast in locations near me in canada are far cleaner and newer
looking compared to walmart USA. most existing were upgraded to "super
centers" and several more locations are opening soon where as in the states
they are downsizing and closing locations.

------
Naga
Every time I read an article about Target, the only people who come out
looking good in the end is the Hudson's Bay Company. While I loved Zellers and
shopped there on a regular basis, it was worth more for its locations than the
actual business. I worked at Zellers briefly in the years leading up to its
eventual dismantlement and the question on everyone's mind was really "what is
going to happen to all of these stores?" HBC made out like a bandit by
seducing Target into buying them in one fell swoop.

~~~
alanctgardner3
Do you have any insight into when Zeller's was good and what went wrong? HBC
seems to have done a much better job turning around The Bay locations (albeit
very gradually) and apparently they also own Saks?

I'm pretty young and all of my experiences were a combo of dirty, badly
stocked stores, products that I didn't care about, bad fluorescent lighting,
and employees who didn't give a shit. I also don't really shop at Walmart, but
Walmart seems kind of sterile and organized, at least. I honestly did not know
why anyone would ever go into a Zeller's - they had clothes and housewares and
groceries and stuff, but somebody else seemed to do all of those things much
better.

~~~
ayuvar
Zellers (no apostrophe, even though it was started by a guy named Zeller) was
able to stay 'on top' of the Canadian department store game for quite some
time. They were founded in the 20s, profitable well into the 90s, and had a
niche and a format that was poorly understood by existing department stores.
Their only real competition was K-Mart.

HBC bought them out in the early 80s and then started shovelling more
acquisitions on top; Bonimart, Fields, Woodward's. They had enough capital to
start fixing things - in the mid to late 80s your parents probably remember
"Club Z" and pushing aggressively against their remaining competition to make
sure they had the lowest price in town.

In the late 90s, just as Walmart was starting to show up in Canada (by buying
up the burned-out corpse of Woolworth's) and threaten pretty much every brand
under the HBC umbrella, HBC centralized decision making and planning in HBC's
Toronto offices and under HBC execs.

K-Mart basically collapsed at this time from the same pressure; HBC opened up
the purse and bought a lot of old K-Mart locations, intending to convert them.
Eatons also died, and their assets were acquired by Sears.

I worked at Zellers to put myself through school briefly during this general
time period, and I remember hysteria and confusion in all ranks of retail and
management staff. Communication with HBC was generally command-and-control
with no mechanism to individually fix brand-wide or regional problems.

Actual Bay stores in the late 90s were also doing poorly, and it was likely
that Zellers was seen as a losing anchor that needed to slash margins further
to compete with Walmart.

I will miss the chain. I had never really gone in prior to working there, but
after working there I had gained enough weird institutional memory to be able
to quickly find whatever I was looking for even in Zellers I had never visited
before.

It is now basically a race in Canada to see if HBC or Sears will pull out
first. Neither one of them are doing particularly well.

Canada is, in general, not kind to its department stores.
[http://ottawacitizen.com/business/local-business/canadas-
big...](http://ottawacitizen.com/business/local-business/canadas-big-box-
graveyard-target-joins-illustrious-company)

------
mbesto
This is why the leveraged systems integrator consulting model (i.e. Accenture,
Deloitte, etc.) is inherently flawed. If only these firms would take a few
experience senior people (as opposed to a tiered leveraged or pyramid
hierarchy with tons of juniors at high margins) and implement the systems I
think they would find a lot less failures.

------
_rpd
People are mentioning Walmart as a competitor, but not Amazon. Is Amazon not
competitive in Canada?

------
SixSigma
Sounds like they got played by Walmart too.

"Raise you $1.6bn"

"Raise you $1.8bn"

"I'm out, enjoy Canada"

------
faitswulff
What an incredible debacle. Select quotes regarding their technology
decisions:

> "While SAP might be considered best in class, it’s an ornery, unforgiving
> beast. Sobeys introduced a version of SAP in 1996 and abandoned the effort
> by 2000. (It wasn’t until 2004 that the grocery chain tried again.)
> Similarly, Loblaws started moving to SAP in 2007 and projected three to five
> years to get it done. The implementation took two years longer than expected
> because of unreliable data in the system. Target was again seeking to do the
> impossible: It was going to set up and run SAP in roughly two years."

> "The company wasn’t doing it alone, however, and hired Accenture (which also
> worked on Loblaws’ integration) as the lead consultant on the project. [...]
> Accenture, which Target hired as a consultant on SAP, said in a statement:
> “Accenture completed a successful SAP implementation for Target in Canada.
> The project was reviewed independently and such review concluded that there
> is no Accenture connection with the issues you refer to.”"

> "The company had purchased a sophisticated forecasting and replenishment
> system made by a firm called JDA Software, but it wasn’t particularly useful
> at the outset, requiring years of historical data to actually provide
> meaningful sales forecasts."

> "The depots were hampered by other factors, caused by lingering data
> problems and the learning curve associated with the new systems. Manhattan,
> the company’s warehouse software, and SAP weren’t communicating properly."

> "The auto-replenishment system, which keeps track of what a store has in
> stock, wasn’t functioning properly, either. Like many other parts of retail,
> replenishment is an exacting science that can go haywire without correct
> data. At Target Canada, the technology relied on having the exact dimensions
> of every product and every shelf in order to calculate whether employees
> need to pull more products to fill an empty rack. Much of that data was
> still incorrect, and therefore the system couldn’t be relied upon to make
> accurate calculations."

> "To add even more headaches, the point-of-sale system was malfunctioning.
> The self-checkouts gave incorrect change. The cash terminals took unusually
> long to boot up and sometimes froze. Items wouldn’t scan, or the POS
> returned the incorrect price. Sometimes a transaction would appear to
> complete, and the customer would leave the store—but the payment never
> actually went through. The POS package was purchased from an Israeli company
> called Retalix, which worked closely with Target Canada to address the
> issues. Progress was maddeningly slow. In 2014, a Retalix team flew to
> Toronto to see first-hand what Target was dealing with. After touring a
> store, one of the Retalix executives remarked, “I don’t understand how
> you’re using this,” apparently baffled the retailer managed to keep going
> with so many bugs. But Target didn’t have time to find a new vendor and
> deploy another technology. [...] Unlike SAP, Retalix is not an industry
> standard, and why Target chose it isn’t entirely clear."

> "Like SAP, the replenishment software was brand new to Target, and the
> company didn’t fully understand how to use it."

------
moeedm
Walmart. Thats how.

------
kazinator
Hi Diego! Please update the link to the original Canadian Business article
(given in the article):

[http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-
cana...](http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/)

The Maclean's copy of it is unreadable due to the ridiculous font combined
with narrow column width.

~~~
dang
We changed the URL from [http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/what-really-
happened...](http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/what-really-happened-at-
target-canada-the-retailers-last-days/).

That reveals that it was posted before
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952937)),
but since there is active interest in this story we'll leave this one up and
merge those comments here.

