Marks & Spencer

[WelshMoth]

I know that this has probably been done to death already but is there no end in sight to their cyber-attack?

Im desperately trying to buy a dress and some vests that are never in stock in any store near me so online is my only hope!

First world problem clearly but I’m not a huge shopper so when I see something I like, I just want to get it!

Amazing! So you're a deputy head and an electrician at the same time? That's seriously impressive - how do you juggle it?

I visited the ‘flagship’ M&S yesterday and had a long and lovely chat with the till man. He said that they were getting stock deliveries just didn’t know what they’d be until they arrived.

I really felt for them. They were so upbeat and jolly and doing their best to be helpful but with their hands tied behind their backs.

Slogging up to Oxford St is a pain when you don’t know if they’ll have what you want but in comparison to the stress they are probably going through it’s nothing.

Good if so, I’m glad they’re not.

I think they’re in worse trouble than first thought

I've decided to spend a day of my half term trekking up the nearest big M&S (an hour away) to see if I can get stuff I want for my holiday there. I'm really hoping it won't be a long vista of empty rails.

I do think the July sale will be immense, though. Just can't sit on my hands that long!

We appear to have Mr Benn on the thread. Even just the illustrious teaching career - PT in a grammar school, art(?) in an FE college and throwing books at kids in the physics department, while working part time and earning a mint as a sole trader electrician cum builder with staff to play practical jokes on...

I’m absolutely devastated - they had quite a few things I was planning to buy for myself , DH and DD, not only for now but summer holidays things as well. I started putting things in my online basket already and the very next day cyber attack happened. 😢
Waiting until July sounds way too much.

Same, and our holiday is booked for 21st June so I won't be able to get my holiday stuff in time 🙁

They’re Miss Rabbit

My “big” one is alright, but the small ones ie the one in my local train station is practically empty. Think it’s hard for them to restock so quickly.

There will be a point of failure somewhere regarding stock levels and logging it all. It's pretty hard to send a man and a van around without a system keeping track of everything.

It could be that they have no way of tracking centrally what's being sent where from the central warehouses. So they load up and send out 20 lorries each containing different items but they then can't log that Lorry 1 has gone to Cardiff, Lorry 2 has gone to Birmingham ect, Lorry 3 has gone to Aberdeen.

Or it could be on the store end where they can't log what's coming in (or if they can they're having to do it all manually which takes forever) so deliveries are arriving in the stores but the stores then can't update their stock levels so stuff will just sit in the warehouse.

When something like this happens you have to revert to manual spreadsheets and unless you work with it everyday something like excel can be incredibly complex especially once you start adding in formulas ect. It's also easy to accidentally delete a row or cell which in turn messes up the entire spreadsheet. The staff who work in the warehouse typically aren't the same people with advanced spreadsheet knowledge so there will be one or two people trying to update the stock levels for the stores.

This worries me too @londongirl12 M&S has had such a renaissance in recent times that it would be a real shame if the cyber attack kills off the momentum they’ve had and costs staff their jobs. It’s also a real concern about which other institutions are on the list of future targets.

My company had a cyber attack in June. Fairly big b2b company but not retail. It took us until October to get our systems back… everything had to be rebuilt and extra cyber security implemented. We’re still dealing with data restoration from our manual processes now! Nearly a year on! It’s not as simple as just ‘getting back to normal’.

Not forgetting, has also…
Been repairing TVs and fitting aerials for 22 years.
Has worked in conveyancing.
Is in the building trade.
Switched from teaching to caretaking at the same school.
Moved from teacher to Estates Manager in the same school, before becoming overarching Estates Manager for 3 secondaries and 4 primaries.
Quit teaching to retrain as an electrician.
Runs a manufacturing business.
Was putting scaffolding up a 3-storey building back in January.
Doesn’t work before 10.30am or after 4pm.

You’ve misunderstood what I wrote.

I’m more than aware (in my IT untrained mind) that this is an attack of catastrophic proportions.

I was saying that there’ll be such a surge of online sales come July, that I’m expecting a website crash - this is separate to this attack.

And yes, quite - I think it’s clear from this thread that there’s lots of sympathy for staff having to bear the brunt of things.

I did go to a store but the sizes were lacking and the trousers I bought were too short I know I should have tried them on

Any 1 IT system takes over a year to plan and install. M&S has the equivalent of 4 IT systems to build, test, go live and integrate. All whist trading and losing millions in sales. The pressure on HQ staff must be immense.

A hustle here and a hustle there. Maybe they also walk on the Wild Side.

I suspect they’ll be screwing their suppliers by cancelling loads of orders to reduce the need for discounting.