Want to know what Target did in 2013 at the start of its supply chain journey?

Set goalposts for its experiments.

Where a lot of companies fail with experimentation is they don't know what success is, and too often experiments are make-believe; as a result, when tough times come, they all need to be cut because there are no financial goals for their experiments. The CFO doesn't trust they are still worth the time. Nate Skiver fleshed out this idea a little bit - “many companies evaluate the ROI of each project or new capability individually and either abandon or de-prioritize it when results fall short, treating these initiatives as a budget line item instead of a long-term supply chain investment.” This is decidedly not how Target operates.

Rich Richardson observed that “far too many businesses still think of supply chain as a cost of doing business instead of treating it as a value creator.” I agree! Target seems to be getting it, better than most, but yes - agree.

One of the first things Target said before they started was this: "If this is going to work, our supply chain margins need to resemble a customer picking up something in the store."

And then it set about trying to make that happen.

Now 95%+ of all online orders are from their stores - either pickup, curbside, or ship from store. But that wasn't the goal - this was the result. Their goal provided them financial constraints around what "success" looked like for them.

Faced with the current business which is missing margin targets, and a (potential) future business that could dig them out of the hole, the CFO couldn't help but keep investing.

8 years later, look what happened.