
Claire Webb, managing director at Advanced Supply Chain Group, takes us through a typical day in the life, from getting up and driving to work, juggling meetings and the day-to-day, to going home and relaxing with a good book.
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I live in Bawtry, South Yorkshire, almost in Nottinghamshire, so it’s typically an early start most mornings. I tend to leave the house at around 6.45am, heading to our offices on the Euroway Trading Estate in Bradford. Although the journey takes about one and a half hours, I really don’t mind the drive. It’s a good opportunity to listen to the radio and catch-up on the news and when I’m sitting in traffic, I use the time to think through the day ahead.
I joined ASCG around eight months ago now and I’m still enjoying taking the time to get out and meet people throughout the company.
This morning I’ll be meeting with members of the IT team. While it’s easy to talk about the importance of people in business and throw around buzz terms like ‘employee engagement’, I really am a firm believer in making an effort to build a rapport with people. This needs to be genuine and is only possible if you take the time to understand what matters to people and what makes them tick. It helps connect employees with the business and creates a much more positive place to work.
Although the meeting with the IT team will cover-off updates on software development projects and other practical details about the performance of the systems we’ve developed for clients, it also encourages the team to share any ideas, opinions and concerns.
This is what really drives innovation and enables us to create technology solutions that make supply chains quicker, easier and more efficient for our customers. It’s the best part of the meeting and about spending time with people – it’s when you get to see what motivates and excites them.
I always try to make a point of using time during each morning to look at exactly what we’re working on, both from a broader strategic point of view and to also consider key tactics.
Our operations are helping high street stores, online and omni-channel retailers move thousands of products around the world, every day.
It’s important that we’re constantly taking stock of how we’re delivering against client expectations and how markets and operations are changing.
The rate of change in artificial intelligence and digital technologies throughout the world of logistics is incredible and we want to ensure that we’re always keeping ourselves and clients ahead of the curve.
Lunch today is a quick one and mainly involves resisting temptation to tuck into some delicious looking cakes the team has baked to celebrate a birthday. This afternoon I’ve got a few one-to-one meetings in the diary with different members of our senior management team.
These provide a good opportunity to challenge ourselves to make sure we’re living our company values, rather than simply being something that look good on our website.
‘People’ form one of our six core values and during a meeting with our People Director, Derek Wright, we’ll be looking at new initiatives to promote better personal wellbeing.
This includes small daily efforts like the provision of free fresh fruit for staff as well as a long-term focus on creating a truly great place to work in which our people feel supported and nurtured at work and in the rest of their lives.
I’m also meeting with our commercial team to run through our new marketing strategy and take a look at some new IT-focused sales brochures.
We invest heavily in developing bespoke software programmes that meet a customer’s specific supply chain objectives, rather than trying to sell off-the-shelf solutions.
Many customers share the same goals of improving efficiencies and streamlining operations, but their processes, systems, challenges and opportunities are all different and a bespoke approach proves more effective.
We want the new brochures to showcase our software expertise without the hard-sell or technical jargon. The brochures look great and with just a few small changes, they will be ready for our founder and executive chairman Mike Danby to take on a trip to the US next week.
I always try to relax at the end of the day with a good book. I’m currently reading The Joy of Work, which is all about workplace culture and loving what you do. I like it because it’s not full of corporate spiel or impractical workplace theories.
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This article originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post.