Senior Supply Chain Operations Associate (Air)

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about 3 years old

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At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make it easy and accessible for everyone. We’re shaping the future of a $8.6T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year. 

The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. At a valuation of $8 billion, we’re experiencing record growth and are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us.

Supply Chain Operations Senior Associate (Air)

 

The opportunity:

The role of the SCOps Senior Associate is a critical part of making Flexport’s mission to make global trade easy for everyone a reality. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries. In this role, your direct customers are the partners within your region: our account management and customs teams, subcontractors, carriers, terminals and trucking providers. Your work directly supports Flexport’s end customers in achieving their logistics goals. Most importantly, you will play a pivotal role in building the next operational model at Flexport: allowing us to effectively scale to achieve our mission of making global trade easier for everyone.

 

This role is designed to build your leadership capabilities within a global operations team moving shipments. As the resident expert on the intricate world of the logistics industry, you will take on a player-coach role in the mentoring and development of your team, leading them to uphold performance standards and guiding them to solve complex issues for clients and vendors. You will drive your team to build and implement scalable processes and tools, in alignment with your global counterparts and internal stakeholders.  As the person who mentors the team managing movement in your region, you have the unique opportunity to work with your regional account team to improve and grow our customers’ business. 

 

Tactical Responsibilities:

As a supply chain operator, you are an expert in executing the end-to-end movement of shipments within a regional network including Air imports and exports.

  • You will be responsible for supervising, coaching and monitoring the performance of a 3-6 person team in executing the end-to-end movement of ocean freight shipments within a regional network (both imports and exports), including intermodal movements.
  • You will use metrics to guide your regional team to improve and deliver great performance, including data quality and shipment milestone timeliness. You will oversee that your team is meeting internal KPIs and SLAs that demonstrate quality delivery.
  • You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by leading business implementation and shipment execution for new clients and opportunities.
  • You will oversee the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality: shipments move “on-time” and exceptions are handled appropriately.
  • You will build scalable operational infrastructure and procedures to ensure they are delivering the highest levels of efficiency and productivity for your customers. If they are not, you will look for opportunities to improve them.
  • In Ocean teams you will: 
    • Serve as the day-to-day relationship manager for internal and external partners such as ocean, intermodal and drayage vendors, the Customs team and the Network Operations team. You will oversee day-to-day operations with these partners and act as the primary point of contact for internal and external escalations.
  • In Network teams you will:
    • Serve as the day-to-day relationship manager for internal and external partners such as terminals, carriers, and warehouses, the Customs team and the Air Operations team. You will oversee day-to-day operations with these partners and act as the primary point of contact for internal and external escalations.
    • Analyze data to rate subcontractor performance. Your analysis will inform subcontractor/carrier performance management initiatives, and you’ll lead the effort with procurement to improve performance.

Adaptive Responsibilities:

  • You will analyze data to rate vendor (e.g. carrier, trucker) performance and inform performance management initiatives.
  • You will help design, build and implement operational infrastructure and procedures in the day-to-day workflow, while constantly identifying and executing on opportunities to realize optimal efficiency and productivity.
  • You will empower Account Management by leading feedback loops to ensure client needs are met.
  • You will use metrics to spot opportunities to improve and deliver great performance in your team, including data quality and shipment milestone timeliness.
  • You will act as a consultant to your regional team, product & engineering and the operations excellence team on ocean supply chain operations.

Scope of Duties:

  • Point of contact with Shippers
  • Ready-to-ship gatekeeper; Ensure Core as one source of truth with most up-to-date paperwork and data provided by shipper, following DG, air compliance & export control policy
  • Shipment life-line creator; Create schedule for all shipments, setting expectation to all stakeholders and define when to report exceptions/discrepancy
  • Shipment life-line executioner/monitor; Follow up on shipment status as per plan and report actual milestone; Handover & takeover control amongst OCCs when shipment 
  • Fire-fighter; Report any exceptions and activate recovery plan to salvage service commitment if needed
  • Neurons of the Global Network; 1st escalation point of all operations incident, coordinate and adjust operation plan in case of incident reported from overseas. (likelihood 24x7x365 operations)
  • Bridging Supply and Demand; track demand volume projection and cooperate with procurement team
  • Network traffic controller; Decide cargo uplift priority without compromising end-to-end transit time commitment and with optimized cost-to-serve in mind

 

What you will need:

 

Experience:

  • BA/BS degree
  • Minimum 3-5 years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, or consulting

Mindset:

We’re looking for folks that have:

  • Desire to “build a better machine” and get irritated when things aren’t optimal
  • Demonstrated ability to lead small teams in day-to-day execution
  • Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinking with strong problem-solving capabilities 
  • Strategic vision and ground floor execution
  • Excitement to manage vendor relations and create best-in-class, innovative structures to do so
  • Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills
  • A client service mindset; you are obsessed with client and squad happiness
  • Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!
  • Flexibility to get the job done when needed. Willing to work outside office hours and occasional weekend or night shifts in certain locations.
  • A “compliance first” attitude to keep our regulators happy and enthusiastic about Flexport since we operate in a heavily regulated industry.

Skills:

  • Designing processes
  • Optimizing processes analytically
  • Pressure testing qualitative work
  • Building feedback loops for a product or service
  • Problem Solving 4: Building consensus among people with strong differing opinions
  • Managing time and commitments
  • Building and using your work process
  • Generating ideas through data
  • Forming hypothesis and developing experiments
  • Framing problems
  • Investigating and troubleshooting the customer’s problem
  • Execute complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities
  • Applying policy, process, and best practices
  • Solving problems through hypothesis-based root cause analysis
  • Execute complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities

 

Growth and development:

Skills you can advance in this role:

  • All of the above +
  • Coaching your colleagues
  • Encouraging your team to improve how the team works
  • Helping your team learn from performance outcomes
  • Inspiring your team
  • Engaging a customer with empathy and without bias
  • Leading difficult conversations
  • Building strategy through a customer viability lens
  • Organizing, leading, and participating in meetings

What you will learn:

 

  • You will gain the skills necessary to lead a team of increasing scale and function. You will learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team members on skill development.
  • You will learn what it takes to effectively manage vendors: holding them accountable while also creating win-win opportunities.
  • You will learn how to thrive in an ambiguous environment, research and implement operational hypotheses and inform the strategy of a newly built team.
  • You will gain specialist expertise to become an ocean or network operations and intermodal subject matter expert within the company. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy.
  • You will gain the ability to continuously improve the client experience through a deep industry understanding. You are singularly positioned to realize how we can both work within and push the ocean industry forward to meet the standards of Flexport’s client-centric service.

 

Future tracks this role could lead to:

 

  • Procurement or other expert roles requiring deep expertise in a specific area of supply chain management. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy. You will have built processes and tools or led webinars, amplifying your knowledge.
  • Management or other roles requiring extraordinary team leadership. You will have learned how to be a player-coach who apprentices team members on skill development.
  • Client advisor/ account management. Your deep passion for growing our customers’ business sets you on a path to become their advocate and representative at Flexport.

 

Skill Glossary

 

Designing processes

Tactical performance, (i.e., creating 'convergence' in an organization by learning from past experiences), often requires work to be codified into step-by-step processes. This skill is about designing those processes.

 Fluency in this skill typically includes:

  • Designing processes at the average level of complexity for your organization. 
  • Designing processes for multiple people.
  • Applying the lean tool kit to ensure your inventory is kept to a minimum.
  • Applying the six-sigma tool kit at the level of blackbelt to ensure that unwanted variation is kept at a minimum. (If the process prevents experimentation, it will be stagnant and suboptimal).
  • Building measurement systems directly into the process.
  • Creating systems that allow participants of the process to continuously improve it (e.g., using guardrails instead of absolutes).

Fluency in this skill typically requires knowledge of:

  • Software used in your organization.

Signs of someone still learning this skill might include:

  • Creating simple (rather than complex) processes.
  • Constructing processes that don't enable adaptation.
  • Not applying the right toolkits that would enable high performing processes.