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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I suspect it’s a combination of all the stuff mentioned so far.

And for all we know? They could have a massive rat or other pest infestation, and are having the place fumigated, or some structural issue has come to light which can’t be fixed whilst working around Business As Usual.

To be fair, pest control can totally be a reason, how's the situation in UK regarding pest control?

it can be an issue, but a warehouse of plastic shouldn't really have anything to attract significant numbers of vermin (well apart from skaven and those just get sold to AoS players)

 Fayric wrote:
(I personally like the idea of them all looking for Manfred von Drakkens scenery).

James Workshop-Tear this place apart if you have to, but FIND Manfred von Drakken's Aegis Line! I shall suffer no more delays!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I suspect it’s a combination of all the stuff mentioned so far.

And for all we know? They could have a massive rat or other pest infestation, and are having the place fumigated, or some structural issue has come to light which can’t be fixed whilst working around Business As Usual.

Could be as mundane as putting in new racking system, and upgrading their forks to Isle-Masters to facilitate more room for racking.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
it can be an issue, but a warehouse of plastic shouldn't really have anything to attract significant numbers of vermin (well apart from skaven and those just get sold to AoS players)

a warm place to hide with lots of cardboard to sleep on sounds pretty close to rat heaven

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
it can be an issue, but a warehouse of plastic shouldn't really have anything to attract significant numbers of vermin (well apart from skaven and those just get sold to AoS players)

a warm place to hide with lots of cardboard to sleep on sounds pretty close to rat heaven

Yeah but normally they also want food and water. Granted rodents will eat a bunch of stuff you'd think wouldn't be eaten, but in general they are more likely to swarm in areas where there is abundant food access.

So chances are they'd only be an issue if the warehouse has some food aspect to it. Eg being near to fields or another warehouse storing food etc... Or a really really badly kept kitchen/rec room with bad waste management issues and the like.

Might be to see why there keeps being unreleased products sent out as part of people's orders...

 Kanluwen wrote:
Might be to see why there keeps being unreleased products sent out as part of people's orders...

Must be the rats…

A full week is kind of massive... a 1/4 of worth of production a month assuming they have continuous production during day and night etc. We are talking serious things here. No company would be inclined to lose that amount if they did not absolutely had to.

Think about this, any dent to the profits even if its just one month needs to be recovered fast during next months not to compromise yearly reports, shareholders do not like that.

Either way GW has apparently built fat so they can take it and I don't want their shares either, so good luck for them.

I hope they find some Zoats boxes in the process and sell them again

You realise thy aren’t stopping production or sales, just shipping, right?

 Mr_Rose wrote:
You realise thy aren’t stopping production or sales, just shipping, right?

But when most business, including GW, run on "just in time shipping" models, that means there will be issues. The warehouse is right in the middle between production and shipping. If the Warehouse shuts down that means items produced either have to ease off or stop (as there's no where to put them) or get diverted to another location.

Similarly your warehouse is where you ship from, so if its closed for a week that means nothing is leaving for a week. Again either GW is going to momentarily divert current production to another location so that they can keep current production rolling; or they are going to have to pause other systems too.

Not forgetting that the warehouse might also be where picking and packing happens of the boxes (though this might be a factory thing)



So yeah the warehouse shutting down means a lot of stuff for GW. For us as customers it might mean one week where we don't get a release and potentially where local stocks could dwindle lower than normal since there won't be a normal restock. Depending on what the shutdown allows them to do; it could also mean some reduced stock for a week or two after as the system gets back up to speed. Stores putting in larger than normal orders because of the week shortfall and so forth taking time to settle out again.

anybody here on dakka working in logistics?

 Kanluwen wrote:
Might be to see why there keeps being unreleased products sent out as part of people's orders...

Might be a disgruntled mailorder troll that hid in the underwarehouses.

 Mr_Rose wrote:
You realise thy aren’t stopping production or sales, just shipping, right?

I would think that would be clear to anyone that the warehouse is pivotal and key in GW model. You remove it from the equation and all other departments become compromised if not redundant. Effectively unless they incur into further money drain and look externally, I dont know. I mean theres a reason they have their warehouse. XD

Lets also not forget the ripple effect, that sometimes makes or breaks a company, the time to sort this issue is one thing but recovering and get back to full swing can become a problem itself.

Potentially and hopefully this was not has unplanned has we think and already covered on the budget for the year. Although a week off is a lot of time.

GW recovered from worse during the Pandemic with even more time fully shut down; even more stock stripped from shelves and vastly reduced operating capacity when they started up again. To say nothing of global shipping issues and such.


So I'm sure they can weather the warehouse being shut for a week.

 Overread wrote:
GW recovered from worse during the Pandemic with even more time fully shut down; even more stock stripped from shelves and vastly reduced operating capacity when they started up again. To say nothing of global shipping issues and such.


So I'm sure they can weather the warehouse being shut for a week.

Sorry I wasn't clear. I should have not used the make or break remark.

These companies have a budget/plan that its like the holy bible for them... things like sales numbers and goals, profits for each month etc.
When I say recover, I mean recover to have those numbers back on target. Not like recovering from a catastrophic event that can damage them in a more fundamental way.

So yeah Im sure they have fat for much more.

If this was planned and part of the budget even better.
For us clients should not be an issue at all, we already seen weeks of delays and out of stocks as normality.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I suspect it’s a combination of all the stuff mentioned so far.

And for all we know? They could have a massive rat or other pest infestation, and are having the place fumigated, or some structural issue has come to light which can’t be fixed whilst working around Business As Usual.

To be fair, pest control can totally be a reason, how's the situation in UK regarding pest control?

Pests are totally out of control in UK but we should have them removed soon, by General Election. Don't know if GW have rodent problem though.

 Overread wrote:
For us as customers it might mean one week where we don't get a release

The horror.

 Overread wrote:
and potentially where local stocks could dwindle lower than normal since there won't be a normal restock.

It's not an emergency shut down. They should be able to send some more stuff to their shops and retailers before - the closure is not tomorrow and they knew about it at least some weeks or months ago.

Yea I think I'll live without buying GW for one week

They could easily do a mto week to keep sales up without needing the physical space.

I think this could actually be a “good”* thing; if you’ve got a buggy, cocked up ERP implementation there’s basically two solutions**; limp along with a bunch of half-arsed bodges and patches and rely on your frustrated, stressed and consequently over-worked staff to hold things together by their fingertips, or you can work out proper solutions to the problems and then actually implement them.

Unfortunately, “implementing proper solutions” is generally a giant version of “turn it off and on again”, which for a system this complex is not easy. It probably only takes a day or so to actually install the upgrades, but you’ve got to get everything into a known state before you start (so complete stock take with no changes) and then do some testing afterwards to make sure it’s actually working as intended. But it’s a much, much better solution, so having a company that’s smart enough to take a short term hit for long term gain is a good thing.

* obviously, having an even smarter company that does the implementation correctly in the first place is better, but GW are hardly unique in this.

** can you guess which approach my company has currently taken?

 Overread wrote:

 Mr_Rose wrote:
You realise thy aren’t stopping production or sales, just shipping, right?

But when most business, including GW, run on "just in time shipping" models, that means there will be issues. The warehouse is right in the middle between production and shipping. If the Warehouse shuts down that means items produced either have to ease off or stop (as there's no where to put them) or get diverted to another location.

GW doesn't take orders for items that are not in stock, there's no way they're doing JIT.

No but they are producing what they expect to need for now so that they don't have excess stock laying around. They don't have huge stock levels as kits just waiting is expensive.

Belthanos wrote:
No but they are producing what they expect to need for now so that they don't have excess stock laying around. They don't have huge stock levels as kits just waiting is expensive.

On one hand you don’t want huge piles of stock just sitting in a warehouse waiting to be sold.

On the other you want to minimize the downtime on the production machines that takes place whenever you switch molds.

You are never going to want to make a days worth of sales for one kit, switch molds for the next, repeat. You’d spend all day just with the overhead of spinning the machines up.

But how much do they keep on hand? A weeks worth of kits? A month? I suspect it’s a delicate per-kit math of expected sales, times to make, size, schedule, and probably a bunch of other logistical factors.

beast_gts wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Wow! Their system is so broken its going to need a whole week shutdown to try and fix!

Or they're doing a manual stock check.

^THIS.
I used to work in a logistics field. It's Standards and Practice to not always rely on the numbers, and go inventory the stock for yourself, every Quarter. It was pretty much a nonissue, because of the joys of technology.

 Jadenim wrote:
Unfortunately, “implementing proper solutions” is generally a giant version of “turn it off and on again”, which for a system this complex is not easy.

Can you imagine GW doing this and the raptor cage not powering back up.

 Grot 6 wrote:

beast_gts wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Wow! Their system is so broken its going to need a whole week shutdown to try and fix!

Or they're doing a manual stock check.

^THIS.
I used to work in a logistics field. It's Standards and Practice to not always rely on the numbers, and go inventory the stock for yourself, every Quarter. It was pretty much a nonissue, because of the joys of technology.

That as may be, but they appear to have managed this in the past without shutting their whole mail order business down for a week.

Don’t get me wrong, I hope that this is the silver bullet that will stop the terrible service stories that regularly do the rounds, but the announcement remains remarkably low key for such a unique event.

Unless this is a vision of what is to come every quarter.

So, about a month ago GW had a job listing for a data engineer with some specific requirements on experience that caught my eye.

They specified the selected candidate would be responsible for transferring the digital side of their operation from their on site servers to a cloud-based operation and they would also have to do a report on the physical sites existing network access capabilities and the nessecary upgrade path for the new cloud based system.

So i think this downtime is the shift into GWs entire sales system operating via 'the cloud'.

How complicated is that of an operation, to shift from servers to a cloud?

I'm zero in tech and computer science so I genuinely ask.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
How complicated is that of an operation, to shift from servers to a cloud?

I'm zero in tech and computer science so I genuinely ask.

It really depends on what you want to do, there are multiple paths to migrating to the Cloud. You can do what is called a "Lift & Shift" operation, where you basically copy the server/virtual machine itself to the Cloud. This can be done using automated tools, and will work easily in most cases, but generally doesn't yield very good economic results. There are some other paths including refactoring your entire application (which is generally comprised of many servers, not just a single one) to become more "Cloud-native". This is a more involved process that can take months/years and a dedicated team. You can also completely redo a new application that is fully "in the Cloud" (or maybe even a managed software by a dedicated solution provider), in which case you will want to transform and migrate just the data to the new format.

Generally, you work for the Cloud migration project on a separate environment, and just need to shut down the existing environment (or do a lot of contorsions to have live data-migration capabilities) in the final step of the process.