# Outbound question?



## dcguy86 (Oct 23, 2019)

So I have a buddy who is transferring out to outbound whenever the next job change occurs and I asked them why because of them telling me in the past they didn't wanna do the lanes. When I talked to them tonight they were telling me it was not prod based and I wanna know if what they were telling me was true and I personally find it hard to believe that its non prod based. I mean if it is then I may go there at some point.


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## ItChecksOut (Oct 23, 2019)

Not that way at my DC..

Now, lanes are what they are for the most part and maybe once or twice a month the DC Gods will smile upon you and you will run around 85 to 90% and have a pretty easy day. But normally ... you earn your pay. 

If you run non con, its cherry pick or run the shit out of crap freight to hit prod. 

Door closers dont have prod but stay busy. 
GPM is prod based. 

Not sure what they are getting at unless some DC's have changed.


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## notfit05 (Oct 23, 2019)

If your a loader or hitting lanes then no it’s not prod based but let to many  lights cut on for to long and see if you don’t have someone on the radio or an om have a talk with you


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## Hal (Oct 23, 2019)

I did OB for 6+ years and was a trainer there. I never thought lanes were that bad. Occasionally you had days where your ass got handed to you. But as long as you kept your lights out it was fine. And all the running keeps you in decent shape.

Plus OB, in my opinion, has the best specialty functions. Closing kept you busy, and busy means the shift goes by faster and you weren't stuck doing the same thing for the whole night. In our building, if you were good the OM basically left you in charge of the shipping wing.

Mezz has its pros and cons. People who were never mezz trained always complained that we had it easy. And then you get up there and realize what kind of hell on earth you walked into. Its the kind of place where either nothing is going on and you're bored out of your mind or everything is going wrong at once and you're barely keeping your head above water. And its a small team up there so if one or two people aren't carrying their weight it can ruin the whole night.


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## ItChecksOut (Oct 23, 2019)

notfit05 said:


> If your a loader or hitting lanes then no it’s not prod based but let to many  lights cut on for to long and see if you don’t have someone on the radio or an om have a talk with you


I might be splitting hairs here but it is prod based, no you dont have to go pull x number of cartons per hour.

However staffing of lanes is based on the non con and sorter plan, we are expected to be around 400-450 cph in lanes and our OMs make adjustments during the shift with either adding lanes or some times dropping them if you are consistantly running 120% or more... it's not uncommon to run well over prod. It's actually pretty typical to see spikes of 600-700cph for an hour and as you would guess, that sucks.

As I said above some times *though rarely*  you might get lucky and get by with running around 80% all day, but typically you will just take a lane or two off neighbors who are running hot. Ive also had it where I was told to get out and flex sort before when lanes just weren't hitting as expected.

It's like any other department, they staff based of prod and metrics. The only way the oms can justify keeping you for the day is for you to be hitting your prod. You just hear less about it in outbound as most the time you end up over on prod and not under. The nice thing about lanes if you aren't just being slammed is people leave you alone and the day can go by quickly. 

They just recently got onto people that choose to stay and work instead of leaving an hour early that they can't just slack off and get paid, that they need to hit prod and earn their paycheck.


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## dcguy86 (Oct 25, 2019)

I think my friend was just talking about depal.  I had a more senior team member explain it to me and it made more sense to me. I told them I'd only ever cross-train over there and not job change. I'd consider it if my car was paid off and my student debt was paid off, but until then I'll stay with where I'm at now


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