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.