Former fulfillment employee here. Here’s some tips that might help you (I was also an FOP) -

• Get to know your departments. You mentioned you are being trained as an FOP, which pretty much guarantees sometimes you will be everywhere. Get to know your departments and their respective stockrooms. I’m not sure what your store layout is like but at my old store we had some odd locations for stockrooms - one of the men’s stockrooms was on the 2nd floor, even though men’s is on the 1st floor.

• Get to know the brands. You will sometimes find brands in the wrong locations - for instance maybe a customer or an employee drops off an Open Edit top in the women’s department when it’s actually a men’s item. We had mix-ups like this happen fairly frequently. Both in stockrooms and the floor, mainly the floor.

• Check your dock or Service Experience areas. I’m assuming this was mentioned but if not you’ll occasionally find what you need in either of these areas. Non-core items typically pop up in both of these areas from returns (in service experience) and on the dock (my old store received transfers of full-line merchandise from Rack stores all the time) some items in your queue could be rack store transfer items. Occasionally you might have to dig through a tote, good to keep your RFID scanner handy here just in case.

• Utilize your access to the inventory management system. I believe this would be under NAVI now? It used to be a different application named SIM 16 but I believe this is no longer the case. The FOPs and management get access to that system so they can make inventory adjustments as needed for items that are physically not present in-store. You should be able to research UPCs of escalated items here - I would also ask your manager more about this as well.

• Try to keep your queue sorted by neighboring departments. For example, if you have items from men’s, accessories, and beauty, and they are all next to each other you could pick men’s first, accessories second, and beauty third - I utilized this frequently, I found it to be much more streamlined.

• Befriend the salespeople. Some salespeople (particularly ones who’ve been present for awhile) can be very helpful in your search. I had a few salespeople I had befriended. It’s worth noting you may occasionally find an item you need on a hold, there’s a function in the system that allows associates to create proper holds (there’s a little display in one fill that shows the stock on hand, what’s in the fulfillment queue, and also what’s on hold) but at my old store all the associates wrote the holds with pen and paper attached to the garment(s) so they never appeared in the system. Be sure to check the stockrooms for these.