The SMS have slowly had their role trickle over to India. Even though they’re low on the totem pole, I’m wondering if they’re on the chopping block since they fall within merch. Or since there are the rumors of a second round in January, if the train TII in the meantime and axe them then? Of course that would be messed up to our ppl anyways, but it’s just helpful to have someone from the states in this time zone to interact with vendors. Has anyone heard of any whispers on if we may be losing them?
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Merch works with the TII partners, and honestly, they barely engage in monthly meetings when we’re trying to address pain points or improve processes. You can ask them a direct open ended question and still get a one word answer. Half the time it feels like they have no idea what we’re even talking about.
Item setups have been a pain point for years with TII. We do everything right and give them clear context & instructions, and they keep saying they’ll follow our standards but they don’t. Then we spend hours fixing the same issues over and over every cycle. It’s exhausting.
And let’s be real people think the SMS just does item setups, but they do so much more. A good SMS helps support the business and improves executional processes. From what I’ve seen, TII focuses on tasks, not on truly understanding the bigger picture. They don’t know our product, our culture, our guest, or how stores actually work. The collaboration, the context, the relationships.. all of that will be gone.
There would be a huge disconnect especially with the time zone difference. Sure it’s cheaper labor but at what cost? Good luck to merch and the BU trying to “move faster, be stronger, and be better positioned to serve guests,” as Fiddelke said when you have to submit tickets for the simplest thing you used to just Slack your SMS about. Something that used to take minutes to address will now take 1-2 days or more.
Considering that in fall 2024 they finished moving all IDS roles to India, I wouldn’t be surprised if they also moved all Merch Specialist roles over there too. I’m sorry.