GW UK more delays in shipping and miss counted stock

[Gattopardo]

I totally agree with @jimbo1701 and others on this. It's now approaching shameful. 

 

I'm a shareholder in GW so I look at this with a dual perspective , both as customer and shareholder. And frankly I think that top management have really got away with this so far. The fact they have still been able to post sales growth, and the fact that GW is so incredibly profitable (largely down to the dominance of its IP, which top management can take no credit for), means that shareholders/analysts haven't really focused on this as far as I'm aware. For almost any other company, catastrophically poor execution leading to stockouts and inability to fulfill orders (which are, you know, the lifeblood of any company!) would have been seen as a crisis and heads (possibly by now the CEO's, if he hadn't got a grip) would have rolled. 

 

I've asked myself why it's so bad. It's a bit hard to understand but I've wondered whether it's the same causes as how the design studio (on the games design side) is so under resourced (witness the utter debacle that is 10th - they clearly can't effectively design and balance 40k on a three year cycle with their current staffing levels*). GW like to do things in house and they like / expect to do them cheaply. This works for games design and suchlike, because they have a lot of market power over games designers (i.e. can get them cheap) and frankly the selling point of 40k is more the models than it is the game. But this absolutely won't work for stuff like ERP systems. They will have to pay the market rate for that and I reckon they're just too tight to do so, which is stupid as it's costing them money and risking their reputation. There's no justification for this when GW are so ludicrously profitable - in recent years their free cash flow and operating margins have been close to 25%, they sit on substantial net cash and last year made pretax profit of £170m. 

 

This is exacerbated by their frankly impossible to understand decisions on digital availability of rules / codexes. 

 

Unless this all gets fixed soon, at some point it is going to cause some very awkward questions for management. 

 

*There is a separate question of whether 40k should even be on a 3 year cycle at all, irrespective of studio staffing levels (definitely not, in my view, but off topic for this thread). 

Edited September 14, 2023 by Gattopardo

[appiah4]

As always, it's the consumers fault..  Stop preordering :cuss:.

[The Praetorian of Inwit]

GW has all sorts of logistics problems but no-one at the senior level seems to know or care. It is unsurprising. New releases should be every two weeks and the games should be on a four year cycle or longer and they clearly need more staff as the current ones are struggling across all systems. All that would hurt profits though and capitalism is all about unsustainable and unrealistic constant growth no matter the cost. 

[Ephialtes]

I don't think this is about the ERP upgrade - that's been quiet for a number of company updates now (18 months+). I'd hazard a guess that after a bajillion years and no end in sight it's been quietly mothballed.

 

There was a warehouse 'upgrade' a short while back, which I assume was the new East Midlands Gateway site coming fully online. These logistics issues have to be related to that and whatever series of dumb decisions they've taken around robot warehouses, staffing and IT systems related to it.

 

Alongside that we have an existing ecommerce site that's out of stock constantly for many high demand items. The most recent annual report made some spurious claim that it "it doesn't put too much stock on there to be fair to the trade accounts" but that smells like nonsense to me given independents are complaining about the stock that's available to them as well. Also, let's not forget that the ecommerce site is a revenue source for trade accounts - they are able to order stock they otherwise wouldn't have on the shelf direct for their customers. No stock on the webstore means they're GW are missing out on money from multiple avenues.

 

And then you've got that new ecommerce site they're supposed to be launching. In the half year update in January they said "summer 2023!" and in the end of year update in July they said "January 2024" so it appears to be delayed for exactly as long they thought was left. I can't remember the first time we saw a hint of it - maybe summer 2021 in a sizzle reel IIRC? Feels like an targeted 18 month end-to-end is going to take at least double that - I'm going to guess they're cutting scope and racking up technical debt like a madman after that level fo delay ("Just get it out the door! Fix it in live!" is my experience of that kind of miss).

 

All of this points to poorly specced out IT projects, with terrible senior level oversight (probably setting unachievable goals and trying to do it as cheap as possible) and - beyond that - some fundamental core system issues (failed ERP project means old systems still in place) underpinning the entire business.

 

Good news though; they just posted record revenues and profits for their first quarter, so they must be acing it.

[Doghouse]

For me it's the stock issues that are the most frustrating. It's becoming a massive chore to just purchase some items these days.

 

I don't mind waiting an extra week but when you have to wait months just to be able to find a new release in stock then scramble to get it it's infuriating. They have these issues ongoing but still keep pushing the hype on products, I'm genuinely dreading the Scouts release.

 

Someone in management seriously needs to get their act together but they won't because they are still making massive profits so they don't care.

[TrawlingCleaner]

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