Week 7 (2/25/08 - 2/29/08)

Alright...Continuing to catch up on my blog entries...

On Monday I continued to send out my two weekly OTD (On-Time Delivery) reports, and as part of my responsibilities to the OTD task force I met with Diane Zundel to learn how to compile the weekly OTD Top Offenders reports, which will be distributed amongst the members of the task force, and then the appropriate account owners within CORE. While meeting with Diane I alsoe took the time to show her my LTL (Less than full-truck load) analysis for the first time and explain to her how the analysis is compiled. I alsoe asked her for her opinion on the analysis and whether or not she thought it could be a valuable tool for account owners, and whether or not there were any changes she would make. She let me know that she thought the analysis looked great and that I should continue to use it.


After meeting with Diane I met with Catheirne a little bit later in the day to discuss where we stood on the the data file match with our J&J international affiliate Hemishperica. Together we reviewed our most recent emails to and from our contact at Hemispherica and we decided what our next steps would be. In addition to the file match Catherine and I checked to see if I was able to succesfully log into Walmart's retail link system. Retail link is an online order management system used for Walmart and Sam's Club orders. It is something that Catherine uses to track the status of some of our Sam's Club orders, which is something that she will have me do occasionally also.


On Tuesday I continued to work on putting together a powerpoint presentation on my LTL analysis for Wednesday's weekly OTD task force meeting. In the morning I called Gabe on the phone (because he was out of the office) to walk him through my power point to see if he had any suggestions for me. He suggested making a few changes to the content of my presentation and the order of a couple of my slides, and offered me some great advice on things to consider when creating a visual for a presentation. Later in the day after making the changes to my powerpoint and completing it for tomorrow's meeting I had to attend our teams weekly tactical meeting with all of the other members of my team as well as our team business leader Jamie. This is a meeting we try to and hold every week as long as Jamie and a majority of the team is available. At this meeting we discuss any problems anyone maybe currently experiencing with any of the club accounts, or any promotions or problems anyone may forsee in the near future.


On Wednesday with the exception with the exception of checking my email in the morning, working on the rough draft of my powerpoint for my mid co-op presentation, and our weekly OTD task force meeting later in the day everyone in CORE spent a majority of the day at an offsite event held by our departments director Sid Kirkpatrick. The plan for this meeting was to discuss the Vice President of the North American Supply chain's "customer first" initiative, and our departments/ companies customer service performance. All 100+ members of CORE were split into random groups for the day and each group was responsible for answering a group of focus questions related to J&J's/ CORE's customer serivce. Some of the questions for example were; how do we feel we are doing on custoemr service as an organization/company?, How do we feel our customers perceive J&J's customer service? What do we feel we currently do well? Define good cutomer service. List the things we felt we could change to improve our customer service, and which of those we felt we would be able to take on immediately or at some point this year, and which of those we felt would be too much to take on in addition to our top priorities for 2008. Towards the end of the meeting one member of each table/group had to present the groups answers/ideas in front of everyone, managers, business leaders, and every other member of CORE. My group picked me to present our findings. I'm not going to lie, I was nervous. I don't consider myself the best public speaker, and I was still new to the organization and only knew a handful of people in the room, and certainly had never spoken in fornt of so many people (100-115 people). As hesitant as I was at first, I ended up standing up there and presenting, and I survived. I'll be the first to admit I was nervous and I am sure most people in the room could tell I was, and for that reason as well as a few others I believe I could have done better. All and all though I touched on everything we wanted to, and it was a great chance for me to practice my public speaking, which I continue to improve on while on my co-op. Initially I didn't know what to expect from this event and was worried I wouldn't be able to contribute much at all to the group because I was still relatively new. When it was all said and done though I felt that I managed to not only contribute to the group by presenting, and writing everything we had to say down and organizing our thoughts, but I was alsoe able to contribute to answering of the focus questions, and brought a slightly different perspective to the table as a new hire. At the end of the day I as well as most of the people involved felt that it was a great experience. I was able to meet a bunch of new people withing the organization, and experience a type of brainstoriming I have never been a part of.


Afte the offsite event I returned to Skillman to attend our weekly OTD task force meeting and present my analysis to the group. My presentation was not only another great oppurtunity for me to practice presenting but it was a great oppurtunity for me to show the taks force my analysis and to answer any questions anyone had on it.


On Thursday I started my day by meeting with Catherine to show her my mid co-op presentation to see if she had any suggestions for me. After meeting with Catherine and making a few changes to my powerpoint I had to attend our bi-weekly co-op round table meeting. This was the first round table meeting that was held by co-op's as opposed to the co-op mentors. From here on out two co-ops would be paired up and responsible for running a round table meeting and presenting on a chosen topic and educating the group. The topics for the first meeting were Minitab (a computer program similar to Microsoft Excel), and proper email ettiquette. I would be resposible for presenting at our next meeting in two weeks and I was presenting on resume building/writing. Later in the day I attended town hall meeting by the supply chain's VP, where our 2007 performance as well as our 2008 goals were dicussed. Beofre the end of the day Catherine and I met with Amanda to further discuss our Hemispherica file match and to discuss our next steps.


Friday I spent the entire day along with the rest of the co-ops in our first day of PE (Process Excellence aka six sigma) Lite training. This "Lite" training is a condensed 2 day training session on the same material covered in greater detail for the required one weeks training to become green belt certified. We covered the basics of PE and what it is and how we can apply it to our current or future project work, as well as how the project charter process works for becoming PE certified. After learning a little bit about Six Sigma and Process Excellence in the class room it was nice to learn more about it and how it can be applied. Through out the day we went through examples of the necessary steps to take towards chartering a PE project in order to become PE certified and how we can apply it to our projects even if we don't plan on using it to become ceterified. Given that I will be hopefully be working more and more on my LTL Anlysis project I felt the training was a great oppurtunity to learn how and where I could improve my analysis process and what PE tools I could use to analyze the process steps of my analysis.