Tesco misprice policy discussion area

Dick_Dastardly_3

spa2k wrote:

The process of price increases / decreases is not fundamentally flawed as you have indicated many times before. What i was trying to say is that like any system where there is human intervention, it will go wrong at some point. The bigger the system the greater the likelihood of an error at somepoint. NO system is perfect.

Lets say that for example a member of staff pulls off a label at 10.58am and puts it in their pocket for 5 minutes whilst they go to the toilet. at 11.02 i action a price change on that product thus replacing the original label. at 11.04 the member of staff puts out the label that he requested and got at 10.58. The member of staff cannot be aware of an impending price change, i cannot be aware that the member of staff has replaced my replacement label....the price is now wrong but no one is really to blame....all of the relevant checks have taken place......do you now see my point?

What they all go to spend a penny while having the same label at the same time in every store, thus every store seems to get the same thing wrong (or at least a substantial amount ?) I have heard some excuses in my time but that one is close to the top of the worst ever excuses for a process being useless.

Most of the errors are in the diary/meat aisle where the label does not match product, this is caused by a fundamental process flaw, ie there seems to be no check by person putting label on shelf to the current stock in the shelf. ie SEL new label £6.00, products in shelf £7.00, that has nothing to do with a central change at all, it's to do with not checking, plain and simple, no toilets involved !!

Many of the other errors, such as DVDs and CDs are also down to basic and elementary problems with the process you have, old stickers, old SEL's, etc. If you print a national poster with prices on it, would it not make sense for someone to do a quick check centrally before it was printed and distributed. For example, the JEM fiasco, 2 weeks wrong everywhere.

Human intervention is part of any system, if your process has not been designed to cope with this then you need to hire the relevant consultants to deal with it. Sure Human error does occur but the scale of these errors, in terms of many stores with the same error, must logically mean there is something more wrong than Joe Bloggs having a dodgy chicken korma the night before.

Perfect, your system would not even get close to being okay, never mind perfect, if I were your auditor I be giving you a serious going over about it, I have no idea why your auditors are not, as it presents a serious and material concern regarding the validity of your turnover, hence your profitability, and thus your share price.

Dick_Dastardly_3

reme-bod wrote:

I met up with 'Big Dave - proffessional kidnapper'

Wonder how much 'Big Dave' would charge to kidnap my local CS's, could do with some new ones so that they don't recognise me ! :rotfl:

nannaC

reme-bod wrote:

Perhaps airport style body scanning machines, configured to detect rogue SELs should be installed at each staff toilet entrance. Think of the money it would save!

Cheers :T What great form you are on tonight, pleasecan I have half a pint of the of the intoxicating _party_ substance you are drinking

reme-bod

Perfect, your system would not even get close to being okay, never mind perfect, if I were your auditor I be giving you a serious going over about it, I have no idea why your auditors are not, as it presents a serious and material concern regarding the validity of your turnover, hence your profitability, and thus your share price.

As a matter of interest, who exactly does your audits? Judging by performance I'd reckon they are all internal, or at best from the same auditors who do every store in the country.

Easy to be complacent if the latter, and hard to point the finger of blame if the former.

spa2k

!!!!!!_Dastardly wrote:

What they all go to spend a penny while having the same label at the same time in every store, thus every store seems to get the same thing wrong (or at least a substantial amount ?) I have heard some excuses in my time but that one is close to the top of the worst ever excuses for a process being useless.

Most of the errors are in the diary/meat aisle where the label does not match product, this is caused by a fundamental process flaw, ie there seems to be no check by person putting label on shelf to the current stock in the shelf. ie SEL new label £6.00, products in shelf £7.00, that has nothing to do with a central change at all, it's to do with not checking, plain and simple, no toilets involved !!

Many of the other errors, such as DVDs and CDs are also down to basic and elementary problems with the process you have, old stickers, old SEL's, etc. If you print a national poster with prices on it, would it not make sense for someone to do a quick check centrally before it was printed and distributed. For example, the JEM fiasco, 2 weeks wrong everywhere.

Human intervention is part of any system, if your process has not been designed to cope with this then you need to hire the relevant consultants to deal with it. Sure Human error does occur but the scale of these errors, in terms of many stores with the same error, must logically mean there is something more wrong than Joe Bloggs having a dodgy chicken korma the night before.

Perfect, your system would not even get close to being okay, never mind perfect, if I were your auditor I be giving you a serious going over about it, I have no idea why your auditors are not, as it presents a serious and material concern regarding the validity of your turnover, hence your profitability, and thus your share price.

Being blunt Mr Dastardly, you are simply exposing your ignorance in Tesco processes here. Whilst i have tried to shed a little light on a complicated process, you have simply taken a part of my post literally and for effect thrown in a little toilet humour.

Tesco sells close to 30,000 products in its larger stores yet we see the odd few products being posted on here as misprices....work out the percentage and i will guarantee that it is less than 1% (and yes, i have seen the figures) of prices that are wrong in any given store. Any system that is less than "OK" would have an error rate far greater than 1%.

As i have said before, the system is by no means perfect.....but it is far better than your apparent personal Anti-Tesco crusade would have us believe.

Dick_Dastardly_3

spa2k wrote:

Being blunt Mr Dastardly, you are simply exposing your ignorance here. Whilst i have tried to shed a little light on a complicated process, you have simply taken a part of my post literally and for effect thrown in a little toilet humour.

Tesco sells close to 30,000 products in its larger stores yet we see the odd few products being posted on here as misprices....work out the percentage and i will guarantee that it is less than 1% (and yes, i have seen the figures) of prices that are wrong in any given store. Any system that is less than "OK" would have an error rate far greater than 1%.

As i have said before, the system is by no means perfect.....but it is far better than your apparent personal Anti-Tesco crusade would have us believe.

Uuum, I doubt that very much indeed. Your process is hardly complicated, of that I can assure you, sure you sell alot of products, but there should be a standard process to ensure pricing integrity that should basically be as easy as pie to operate. There is no excuse for it, when you compare it to other companies who really do have complicated processes to deal with.

I have worked in companies whose systems are vastly more complexed than Tescos, for example, Telecommunciations (with billions of transactions per minute over global networks, and operators), Manufacturing (mobiles, consumer products, etc), Transportation, Chemical Industry, etc.

1% error rate on a turnover of £30bn PA, if I were a Tescos employee dealing with pricing integrity I would not be saying such figures, do the maths, that's one hell of alot of cash. A 1% error rate is absolutely diabolical in terms of pricing integrity.

MissG_2

I Can't Wait For The Day Mr T Gets The Price Wrong On Vodka, You Will Find Me Scaling The Country For It If He Does Get It Wrong :d The Local Costume Hire Will Do A Fortune Off Me, As It Is I Am Running Out Of Tesco's To Go To As Me :d

Joel_4

spa2k wrote:

There is no system flag set and this is why there will be many errors on the mobile phones with people not getting discounts when they should.

Yeah, I've had this all day with mobile phones - even called the buyer at Cheshunt to try and sort it out. We just kept getting told 'we are working on it, it'll be done soon!' - even the Hell(p)Desk repeated the same.

In the end we took off the 'not for sale' indicator on BackOffice and everything was fine. Oh well.

As for customers who didn't get their £20 off - the CSM agreed we'd refund £20, not full refund/keep the mobile phone... so no idea!

It probably just cost Tesco Mobile a small fortune

Talking of which... https://www.tesco.com/freesim if any (existing customers - free sims for friends/family) one is interested lol.

Dick_Dastardly_3

reme-bod wrote:

As a matter of interest, who exactly does your audits? Judging by performance I'd reckon they are all internal, or at best from the same auditors who do every store in the country.

Easy to be complacent if the latter, and hard to point the finger of blame if the former.

All PLC's need an external auditor to audit the statutory accounts, so that they present a 'TRUE and FAIR' view of the companies trading position. This is because of legal & taxation requirements, and also for the purpose of presenting information to shareholders, for their decision making HOLD/SELL/BUY.

Within an audit, the auditor should check for MATERIAL issues that would effect the integrity of the accounts. One of the big numbers which would be examined by an auditor would be TURNOVER. This would/should be done by checking the underlying process for creating revenue (of which pricing integrity should be a part) if this is satisfactory, then only a limited amount of transactional data would be looked at. If this is unsatisfactory a larger transactional sample should/would be taken to ascertain the exact problem and its materiality. Depending on the quality of the auditors and way in which overcharges are being accounted for then if this is a big number sitting in the overcharge pot then alarm bells should be ringing, as to whether or not the figures can be relied upon.

Personally I'd love to know what's sitting in the overcharge account, any ideas you Tescos guys of the year-to-date overcharges on a company basis, I reckon it must be quite substantial, and something that any auditor worth his fee should be looking at in a bit more depth.

nannaC

MissG wrote:

I Can't Wait For The Day Mr T Gets The Price Wrong On Vodka, You Will Find Me Scaling The Country For It If He Does Get It Wrong :d The Local Costume Hire Will Do A Fortune Off Me, As It Is I Am Running Out Of Tesco's To Go To As Me :d

:hello: Miss G, NannaC would join you on a fancy dress trail if they get the single malt wrong I would even :dance: between stores just thinking of the _party_ but would also need to stock up on :coffee: