COMMUNICATION  SKILLS

Communication is paramount in holding together public and contract business that was located in various cities throughout the United States.  Weekly teleconference calls with the Sales and Marketing group and the top three levels of the operating people are clearly the only way to ensure everyone heard the same successes and direction Committee meeting results so everyone could get a good insight to the Corporate input.  Formal documented reports were presented such as profit and loss statements, general ledger, operations planning, statistical process results, sales and marketing gains/losses and a review of systems development and customer interfaces.  This communication process led to a very disciplined and well-informed management team.

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT SKILLS

My working experience during the last forty years has been working within the third party logistics/manufacturing industry.  I have a variety of experiences as to how the user of third party managed their business, i. e. public, contract, cost plus, incentive structures, shared process improvement and several other variations of build to suit operational styles and on the manufacturing side; dollar inventory investment control, COGS, labor ratio’s, and sound accounting practices.  The many different types of customer I have worked with also had a variety of measurement tools they used to measure our performance as their third party provider.  Our business was based on building people relationships, which build confidence and respective growth.  It was always important to understand the make-up of the individual/company and develop commonly accepted goals to ensure proper requirements were being met to everyone’s satisfaction.  Many of the value added services we provided our clients helped to reduce their supply chain cost.   Gain sharing was an advantage of utilizing a third party company.

SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION SKILLS

I was fortunate to lead a study for a new WMS process.  We implemented this system parallel to the existing for thirty days, made several changes/enhancements to the system and then went on line.

As for other system interface relative to a corporate posture, the total marketing of a 3 PL was to represent all company affiliates to meet the users complete Supply Chain requirements – from raw materials supply chain management through finished goods distribution.  We focused on developing technology-based solutions for getting materials to the right place at the right time and for the right cost.  On one particular project, hundreds of vendors and retail destinations were involved requiring daily order/load organization throughout the United States using WMS, Manugistics, Caps Toolkit, our freight lines client and other carrier partners.  Customer systems (SAP, Baan, SSA and others) established a direct computer link with the order system and that information was fed into the Supply Chain Management System.  We build a system on the perfect order and expected 100% perfect orders.


The challenge today is to integrate the flow of material and the flow of data into a comprehensive strategy to achieve global marketing goals.  Find the disconnect and you find an opportunity for improvement.

CUSTOMER FOCUS

Often times as a third party provider, if you didn’t tell the customer, “What you have done for them lately” impressions/perceptions could wrongfully be developed.  To avoid this, monthly Board of Director reports for each customer at each facility were developed.  Statistical processes were tracked that the customer requested  and many were tracked on our own to ensure the customer  had an A to Z monthly review of our performance.  We worked and met with our customers on a quarterly basis to review progress, agree to gain sharing principles and how we could continue to improve.  Many times what was important to one customer was somewhat common with another.  This would allow a benchmarking of the “best case” and meet customer needs much quicker.  Each client organization had multiple management levels involved in the working process, which required varied communication skills to ensure we maintained a common approach to their solution.