My Third Week (1/28/08 - 2/1/08)

Things certainly do move quickly around here and with work and school I have certainly been very busy, but I feel as if I am adjusting to the work load and the long days quite well. During my third week I began doing one on one account specific training with my mentor Catherine. Catherine acts as a Customer Logistics Specialist for the Sam's Club account and manages all of our International accounts.

Catherine has been having a data accuracy issue with one of our customers based out of Peurto Rico. So on Monday we met with another CLS within CORE who designed a file match template and an SOP (standard operating procedure) for the file matching process. She educated us on how the file match process works and after meeting with her I sent an email to our contact at this company to coordinate a file match. I included a template designed to assist us in completing the file match of our internal data (product codes) with their data. The overall purpose of this process is to improve data accuracy and our order processing efficiency. Our contact replied with some very positive feedback and I am currently just waiting to hear back from her.

On Monday I also sent out my first weekly OTD Reports which I will be responsible for sending out every Monday. There are two reports, one of which tracks weekly and YTD OTD performance for our top 25 accounts and the other tracks OTD performance for our top ten accounts broken down by distribution center.

On Tuedsay I met with Gabe Ayd, the business leader for Team E which handles Specialty accounts, and discussed a project he would like to give me analyzing LTL (Less than Full Truck Load) shipments for his top 5 accounts. I then spent part of Tuesday and a good portion of Wednesday building and running data queries for each of the accounts he gave me in a program we use called Diamond and then analyzed each ship to's that buys products in divisions that Gabe handles. After doing some analysis and meeting with him a second time, he told me a few things he wanted me to change and we decided that we would setup a time to meet next week.

Aside from coordinating the file match, sending out my first OTD reports, and working on LTL analysis I continued to help Catherine with the Sam's Club account. I helped update our excel spreedsheets which we use on a daily basis to track our orders and on Wedneday I started to process Sam's Club orders with her. Throughout the remainder of my co-op one of my main responsibilities will be processing Sam's orders on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

On Thursday we had our first co-op round table meeting. The round table meeting is an hour long meeting I will be attending every other week with other co-ops and co-op mentors where we can all discuss what we have been working on, work on our presentations skills, and prepare for our mid and final presentations as co-ops. For our next roundtable meeting we will all have to give "Get to Know You" presentations to the group, which will allow us to get to know eachother a little better and critique aeachothers presentations.

In summary, my third week was the first week I was able to reach out to someone from another part of CORE and do some unsupervised work. I learned how to process Sam's Club orders, and I coordinated a file match with one of our International customers. I am still learning many new things everyday and although I am very tired by the end of the week I am really enjoying myself.

Until next time...

My Second Week (1/21/08 - 1/25/08)

Alright well today is actually the last day of my third week at J&J but between my two night classes starting last week which made for a very busy schedule, and getting sick towards the end of last week I just didn't find the time to update my blog. So I figured I would take this time to recap my second week of my co-op before I discussed my third week.

The second week of training was my last week of group training with the other new full time hires and co-op. As opposed to the first week of training which was more general and applied to all new hires and co-op's working in the SLC (Sales & Logistics Company), the second week was more focused on training for our positions as CLS's (Customer Logistics Specialists). We started by walking through a day in the life of a CLS and then spent a majority of the week in training meetings learning how to use different computer programs that we will be using on a daily basis while processing and reviewing orders for the account(s) we will be responsible for or in my case as a co-op, helping out with.

Outside of training I continued to help my mentor Catherine with updating the spreedsheets that we use on a daily basis to track our previous weeks and current weeks orders throughout the order cycle. As a CLS, we handle the Order side of our account(s) meaning we are responsible for our customers orders from the time the order is placed in our system to the time until the order is delivered. We constantly strive to improve our customers order cycle by reducing the amount of errors on their orders through direct communication with the customer, reducing the total number of days in a customers order cycle (date order is placed-date of delivery), and one of our most important metrics that we are measured on as CLS's and something that I will most likely spend a lot of my time while on co-op trying to improve for not only our Sam's Club account but other club accounts within my team like Costco and BJ's is our OTD% (On Time Delivery). An OTD is when a shipment is delivered to the customers distibution center on the customers requested arrival date. For some customers our OTD% isn't really an issue, but for others there are many oppurtunities for improvement.

In summary, I learned a lot more about the order cycle and its different steps, gained a better understanding of what my role as a CLS will entail, and started to become much more familiar with the different programs I will be using on a daily basis.

I will try and recap my third week here at J&J sometime this weekend if not the begining of this coming week.