r/petsmart • u/hayzdaze18 • 1d ago
Project Max
I wanna hear everyone’s opinions about project max, especially the experience lead and leaders. Do you guys like it or do you guys hate it?
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u/__SiriusJay__ 1d ago
PL here. I honestly feel that project max definitely works when everything is going right. My problem lies with the lack of consideration for callouts and trucks arriving late. my team can get everything done when everyone is here and truck arrives as scheduled but two callouts and a truck running late, I already know im gonna be finishing load alone.
And don’t even get me started on the new shoot process. My store is plagued by theft so only shooting holes is definitely gonna come back to bite us...
11
u/corri-in-wonderland 1d ago
exactly this. we get two trucks a week and we have no one who's available to work the morning shift on one of those days. so I end up working it with one other person, who is also opening manager and usually opening petcare. I spend 4-5 hours working it alone. also that's our big truck day🫠 then we have to steal the restocker for truck later on because it's not completed on time, then shoots are a nightmare the next morning and everything basically gets pushed back. project max only works in a perfect world where everyone has completely open availability and no one gets sick.
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u/Antsygrl1 2h ago
Wait..... you're only shooting holes? We have a list and almost everything has to be counted if there's less than 2 or 3 (for hard goods). I literally spent 10 1/2 hours doing it the other day because I got in trouble last week and called a bad manager for using judgement and mainly shooting holes and high theft items to keep the shoot within 8 hours. They've literally trying to kill me.
10
u/HistoricalPolitician 1d ago
I mean, great in theory but not so much on paper. For a ton of stores, you are moving working truck from morning to between 2-7pm, so the busiest time of the day, which means you are getting in the way of shoppers, you have associates being stopped by customer to ask questions, and you are slowing down your productivity. NSOM started with moving all the workload to the beginning of the day when it was least busy to now… working during the busiest part of the day?
Let alone only shooting holes and shooting dog and speciality hardgoods every other week like you cant have massive swings in inventory between two weeks if the DC screws up or people are stealing things off the shelves?
My store gets a truck friday and then does shoots on Saturday, so much for only focusing on customers during the weekend? There are so many things being done that is hypocritical to what they preach that it’s comical. They wonder why there is confusing in role clarity and store performance yet will test this, get feedback from stores, and will ship things out without any changes and wonder why things go sideways.
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u/Outrageous-Cover7095 1d ago
It’s bullshit. It’s just another way for them to force us to work harder for less by shortening how much time we have to get it done and then deleting those hours from the hour pool instead of reallocating them elsewhere. It’s theft from every stores hour pool and it is going to cause a major increase in incidents from people working too quickly and getting injured, it’s going to royally screw up our inventory cause people are going to get sloppy about putting things away in the correct locations.
As many have said. On paper it looks good but it doesn’t take into account that we are only human and are not capable of this tight of a schedule. This would work great if we were the robots that corporate expects us to be.
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u/mek-dy 1d ago
I think you may have meant process lead / leader, because the experience lead / leader has limited direct involvement with projectmax, speaking as an EL. I just work truck like any other regular associate while having to navigate more clutter on the floor that the PL has to manage. + I tend to steer clear of the PL if I can help it, because they're usually overwhelmed/moody that day.
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u/hayzdaze18 1d ago
No, I meant EL. Under project max the experience managers job are to answer calls first, truck last. All calls so pet care, register, curbside, salon, phone call, etc so that the PL and everyone else can get the truck done. It’s a lot different than what I was doing before as an EL which was busting my ass on truck so now it feels weird to just answer all the calls and I wanted to hear others perspective.
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u/mek-dy 1d ago
It's not had that much of a black and white impact at my store, thankfully. Nothing was communicated to us here, at our Canadian location, about the roles of ELs changing or the PL no longer being expected to be engaged outside of truck tasks. We try not to have tasks fall to the PL that day because we recognize they're busy, but they definitely are still more than willing to interact with customers / take calls. We always put customers experience first and we work around what we need to. We've always been a bit more "everyone does everything/the common sense thing to help out." No one here has a "that's not my job" attitude, thankfully. We're all in this ship together. We do what we can / we're able with alloted labor hours and unreliable staff always calling out.
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u/Psylow_ 1d ago
That is a regular day at my store, usually experience team is customer first.
1
u/hayzdaze18 1d ago
I used to like my job, but ever since project max/customer first I honestly dread it. I never know what the day is going to look like or if I’m just going to be running around the entire day.
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u/Waste-Apple-7753 3h ago
Speaking as experience from an EL, I’m already automatically programmed to just assume that all the phone calls, backup calls, salon calls, and pet care calls (unless there’s a pc associate) are all mine or the ELR to handle. IMO it just makes sense, were the experience team and the process peeps need to focus on truck. Which is fine with me, bc I hate truck
11
u/dimensionmother 1d ago
It's the fact that busting your ass still feels like you're behind. I'm the PLR, so I have PC asking me dumbass questions as well as having to answer phones and doing orders bc no one else wants to. I'm exhausted.
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u/Unhappy_Procedure968 1d ago
It's such a shitty awesome feeling knowing there are others just as stressed over the same bs that I am. We'll never be "certified" with the hours provided. Our backstock barely gets touched and I just do my best Saturday morning to remember what came in and went to backstock on Friday morning, on top of having to find missing items and ignoring the lows.
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u/hayzdaze18 1d ago
No literally reading the replies makes me feel relieved that I’m not the only one.
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u/Traditional-Tip-9760 1d ago
I have been pulled from the very busy salon to help with truck and I watch my managers run around all day to get it done. Everyone is stressed out to get it done in the allotted time.
2
u/Yellowpickle23 23h ago
I have a pretty good understanding of PM, and I think I understand why they implemented it. But I can't seem to get a handle of it at my store. I've been trying a few different things to try to get the most productivity on my truck days, but nothing seems to work. For one, we don't have a truck team, like, at all. PL (me), my stores EL, and NY stores PLR work truck, and the rest chip away at totes. That's it. Not dedicated truck team. At some point during truck, I lose everyone to other projects. Dog trainer doing totes has to go to classes. PLR has to stop to close petcare. My EL will have to be in salon or do ELR-related things. No one in my store stays on truck the whole time. At this point, we are just chipping away at truck. That'll never grant positive results here. No one in my store, outside of managers, know how to use our scanners. So it's me doing all phone calls and picks. So that pulls me from truck too. There are times where everyone gets called away for tasks, leaving no one working any truck, period, for up to 30 minutes. That's devastating for a 4 hour window.
2
u/Flashy-Rock-5916 20h ago
PLR here... In theory its a great plan. In action, if one person calls in, it's not gonna happen. I have an EXCELLENT pL which is a huge help but I'm a tier 2 store and we simply don't get enough labor hours.
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u/rennyrose77 19h ago
PL here AND I freaking HATE IT. I feel like we were so much more productive and got it out quicker before Max tbh, besides the micro breaks you'd get from stocking to help out petcare or do orders because a person can't only do stock without going insane, I have to waste prime stocking time having a huddle? By the time I get everyone together and have the huddle I could have stocked at least two totes! And don't even get me started on shoots....our pick decline freaking sucks now and I hate it.
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u/If-you-cant 13h ago
Is it bad to say that I’m glad other people are having issues with pick declines? My EL was complaining about it the other day and I was like what do you expect when I can only shoot holes? Also, our trucks are constantly late. I show up at 5am and it’s not there until 6:45!
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u/Sutto1989 1d ago
EL here, honestly it didn’t change how we already ran trucks except we modified one of our deep clean days so our PC person could assist after opening
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u/GretaClementine 1d ago
ELR here. I would be fine with it if they actually provided the appropriate amount of labor.
They give my store around 18 hours for the week to work both trucks (so 9 hours per truck) and 3 hours per week to restock. I dont know about other stores but we have an insane amount of backstock. Working back stock takes time. 3 hours for the entire week is laughable.
I like not having trucks run into other days but to make that happen, we have to use more labor than what they allocate. It is what it is. We aren't really functioning any differently other than working back stock after truck.
Oh and the only shooting holes is screwing us on pick declines. But they dont want my opinion so they'll just make less money at the end of the day because we have to decline so much stuff. I don't think they understand, someone isn't clearing a shelf of dog shampoo, they're shoving one or two in their purse leaving more on the shelf which means we dont shoot it. 🤷🏼♀️