Targets Presence in Canada

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The Last Days of Target

This submission meets the conditions of our signed Academic Honesty Statement on file with the instructor.

Shawn Ahmadi

CMNS 3000 - S12

Tuesday, June 20th 2017

Shawn Ahmadi
100265568

The Last Days of Target

Target’s presence in Canada was not as successful as we had expected. Although there were many factors behind the failure of the company, everyone who was apart of the Canadian launch has done his or her very best with the limited resources available.  From the beginning of the Canadian integration we have been faced with time constraints. This has proved to be one of the biggest obstacles in our success. The entire concept was based on the over priced purchase of the 124 preexisting Zellers locations. Overlooking the importance of understanding a geographic location when opening a new store, and leaving little to no room for trial and error preparation.

Our tight schedule led us to believe that the company will flourish by doing exactly what we had done successfully in the United States. This was done with the exception of a few critical changes, which involved the selection of the inventory standard system SAP. The new inventory system was the root of many operating problems that lead to our failure. The data dependent software was difficult and confusing to use. Staff had a very hard time updating and utilizing the information, which resulted in empty shelves, overfilled warehouses, and customers leaving empty handed.  The inventory systems biggest flaw was the its inability to differentiate between incorrect inputs being made by employees such as product dimensions, or the amount received in a shipping container.

While the original system was successful in the United States, we were unable to make the necessary changes required for it to work in Canada. Therefor the decision of using SAP was again dependent on time constraints. Regardless, we did all that we could to try and manually correct these errors by removing dummy data from the system, but it proved to be more than the newly hired merchandising team could handle. Although hardworking, the staff was extremely inexperienced and required the correct data to be further processed and reentered back into the system by a third party from Target India. Further adding to the confusion, the third party contractors in India would often make mistakes while entering the large amount of data back into the system. It was clear how important the accuracy of data entry was but the new software did not allow us to find a solution that was fast enough.