Canadian Business magazine has recently published a detailed investigation of what all went wrong with Target’s attempt to enter Canada. Anyone who has been involved with logistics, software projects, and/or large retailing likely has similar stories of how incredibly difficult it is to do things right, especially when introducing new technologies that don’t have the kinks removed.
Since Social Justice and other political correctness rules dictate that there absolutely no reason to be competent, nothing is ever anyone’s fault. So no consequences … just show up get paid go home say “it’s not my fault” and everything will be just fine.
While I appreciate the effort of Canadian Business to have presented this “in depth” analysis of the Target failure in Canada, their omitting the pitiful web presence from Target is curious. The best one could have gotten from their website was locations and possibly store hours and even these were not updated properly.
SAP has the reputation as being the “best” package and yet you constantly hear of huge failures associated with it. Target’s failure is largely due to choosing SAP. If I were Oracle I’d put that in an ad.
The concept that worked so successfully in the US didn’t work in Canada because it wasn’t tried in Canada. Canadian customers were very familiar with Target Stores and didn’t find familiarity in the Canadian stores. The prices were higher and the shelves were empty. A bad first impression killed it. Who would spend billions to import a successful concept and abandon it before opening? Big American companies normally suck a lot of cash out of Canada.
“absolutely no reason to be competent, nothing is ever anyone’s fault”
Also, being competent and finding solutions in projects is often seen by “colleagues” (some “bosses” as well) as possibly having a negative impact on how long the gravy train continues for those who are just along for the ride. So sometimes you find people being actively, umm, appreciative of the saying, “chaos creates cash”.
The Gravy Train didn’t last very long, did it?
The lesson is, do the job right or you will soon not have a job.
SAP is a suicide pill for a company.
speaking of incompetence, this is really rich:
http://www.thestar.com/ yourtoronto/education/2016/01/22/ wynne-panel-to-look-at-retooling-ontarios-economy.html
‘retooling’ the economy her party clobbered by, among other things, accelerating electricity rates.
I worked in an organization that was implementing SAP. It was going to be a two year implementation and they assigned about ten percent of every department to be the experts to shepherd us through the changeover. I left about six months into the changeover for a different corporation two states away. A year or so later two of the SAP Implementation Experts showed up. They left, because they saw the coming disaster. Talking to old friends, SAP was frustrating, and they hated it. Many left and that was one of their reasons.
This was my first brush with failed software implementations. I saw two more failures with other “integrated software solutions” as my division was bought and sold. But the expert consultants made millions. And we made do.
Interesting article. At the time this all happened I lived in Winnipeg, and I made the occasional trip to Target in Grand Forks, just 2 hours down the road.
One aspect that they didn’t touch on but one I think was very important was that not only did they not have product, but the product they had was the same as the product you could buy at WalMart.
I always went to Target not only for the lower prices, although that was a draw, but mainly to get things that I couldn’t buy anywhere else. So when I walked into a Target store in Canada and saw all the same stuff I saw half an hour earlier at WalMart, I was disappointed.
Now, maybe this was an unrealistic expectation to have, but I had it nonetheless. And in talking to friends I found that they also had that same expectation.
Too bad, whatever the full cause was. It could have been great.
It’s similar with 3D engineering/design software for industrial projects, but I guess somewhat different in that the plant does eventually (usually) get constructed and commissioned. Of course vendor lock-in is an “issue” and advertised benefits depend on the promised software features actually being finalized, properly implemented locally and having end users follow (often badly-documented) work processes without deviation. This latter requirement is often not fulfilled as people are not robots and find workarounds to non-functioning features, which defeats the purpose.
And of course, there are always those who enjoy the chaos and schedules dragging out as a form of job security. When the shit hits the fan, the software can always be blamed.
I went to a Target in Houston a couple years ago while on a business trip. No effort really on my part since the store was across the freeway and next to all the restaurants. Target came across to me as a smaller version of Walmart. Since all of our larger centers in Canada already had Walmarts, why did we need a smaller and more expensive version? I did pick up a couple cool Star Wars t-shirts though.
The Twin Peaks restaurant next door offered a better customer experience however. Hooters had a nearly empty parking lot on the other side.
Here’s another one
http://www.brw.com.au/p/tech-gadgets/anatomy_payroll_debacle_it_disaster_w0ZNtHKFBrYfBYxecDjASI
Why didn’t Hooters restaurant sue Twin Peaks restaurant for theft of proprietary linguistically-initiated mental imagery messaging planted in male brains?
More step by step on the Queensland Health payroll here
http://www.couriermail.com.au/extras/qweekend/fff/features/pdfs/338.pdf
Agreed. Target’s web site in the US – full listing of inventory, stock, prices and online shopping just like it’s competitor Walmart. Target Canada’s web site – NOTHING, just like all of the other HBC store sites at the time. If they can’t even offer their customers a way of purchasing, checking stock or prices quickly from home, then why bother shopping there.
I’m a retired, wrinkle-@$$ed old graybeard, and have suffered through 3 …THREE!!! … SAP company-wide implementation fiascoes. In all 3 (the 3rd one is still unfolding, but I retired and missed the worst of it) ONLY the consultants made money, and lots of it. Everybody at the companies who had to work on these SAP implementations got nothing but stress and aggravation. And guess what … the 3rd SAP fiasco that is currently unfolding is in a large Ontario government ministry. The Wynne Libranos + SAP …. What could possibly go wrong? (Just thinking about SAP again makes me need a good stiff drink.)
not to be left out of the loop, we woebeggoten living in that desolate territory formerly known as Ontario, have the e-Health scandal (guess which party of idjits was in power at the time) which cost 8500 quadrillion dollars. just kidding. whatever it cost was all wasted.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth-scandal-a-1b-waste-auditor-1.808640
Ditto on the prices and empty shelves, I thought Target a little creepy, bunch of little people in red shirts running around and jabbering into mike phones; who are they talking to and what are they saying?
After having participated in the largest rail merger in history which brought the North American rail network to its knees for months, I would blame the unrealistic launch schedule. It appears Target shared another roadblock where executive lieutenants maintained silence to protect their careers rather than alert the CEO that the existing schedule could not be met.
As for SAP, you can’t tell me there’s nothing better available in North America. Forcing a massive Teutonic construction down the throats of a free wheeling society is stupid. The product is also massively expensive. If government bodies adopt it, investigations are in order.
Target was FUBAR.
My husband and I strolled into the new Target at our local mall on opening day. It had a small entrance from the indoor mall, and a vast entrance opening onto the parking lot. Guess where the cashiers were located? At the parking lot entrance, forcing buyers, the majority of whom entered from the mall, to schlep all the way to the outer edge of the store to pay, and then all the way back to the mall entrance to continue their travels to other stores and the food area. This was immediate evidence of Target management’s cluelessness about the Canadian indoor mall shopping tradition. We decided right there that Target was in trouble. Extra cashier stations were eventually cobbled together out of women’s wear space at the mall entrance.
The article also mentioned the GIGO problems caused by clueless graduates of the Ontario school system, hired as analysts and merchandisers, who confused metric and imperial measures, and entered typos and spelling errors, causing a cascade of merchandising and stocking glitches. Not a surprise to anyone who compares the skills of today’s graduates with the skills of those who came through the schools before the glorious revolution.
Before signing anything, Target should have hired a few experienced
veterans from the prior Marks&Spencer Canada long running debacle to
clue them in.
Target Canada would likely have failed sometime later anyway even if
the backroom had worked perfectly because it ran on a rigid formula
unsuitable for retail in Canada, its excessive real estate footprint
was a huge burden, and worst of all, many Canadian customers could see
it was a pale imitation of the US stores.
Our low Canadian dollar these days would have spelled “The End” anyway.
Wow. A good read
SAP is an acronym for Stop All Production, which it did.
Maybe not entirely a suicide pill for a company, but….it does cause much grief.
SAP……it is THE operational software at my employer, a large Canadian comm. company. They’ve been using it for about 20 years or so. Somehow, they survive and life goes on.
However…..what a cumbersome interface, it lacks any intuitivity at all. The key, is mastering the little you need to do in it, but, there is little if any ‘direction’ to following the correct path or choices. It is a frustrating, behemoth of a software system to use, and barely tolerable. Maybe it’s retribution from our Teutonic cousins…..
If you are an expert at SAP, thru and thru, you should be very much in demand…….
I remember being exposed to SAP long ago when a company I worked for was considering it. I figured it meant Sorrow And Pain.