Once ambitious, it was a brief stint for Target in Canada. In 2015, Less than two years after it first opening, Target announced to close all its 133 Canadian stores and lay off 17,600 employees after accumulating $2.5 billion in losses. The Canada expansion was announced in January 2013 when Target bought the 220 leases of Zellers, a declining and now defunct Canadian discount chain, from Hudson’s Bay. What went wrong? While various reasons and root causes have been identified, distribution problem is one of the key factors considered to bring the retail giant down. The distribution depots were hampered by other factors caused by lingering data problems and the learning curve associated with the new systems. Manhattan, the company’s warehouse software, and SAP weren’t communicating properly. Sometimes, the issues concerned dimensions and quantities. An employee at headquarters might have ordered 1,000 toothbrushes and mistakenly entered into SAP that the shipment would arrive in a case pack containing 10 boxes of 100 toothbrushes each. But the shipment might actually be configured differently—four larger boxes of 250 toothbrushes, for example. As a result, that shipment wouldn’t exist within the distribution center’s software and couldn’t be processed. It would get set aside in what was designated as the "problem area." These sorts of hang-ups happen at any warehouse, but at Target Canada, they happened with alarming frequency. Warehouse workers got so desperate to move shipments they would sometimes slice open a crate that was supposed to contain, say, a dozen boxes of paper towels but only had 10, stuff in two more boxes, tape it shut and send it to a store that way.

Question: What fundamental distribution strategy did Target adopt and implement in Canada? Please elaborate on options of strategies relating to managing and designing distribution centers/warehouse?