Operations Associate

The opportunity:

The role of the SCOps 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 problem solve impactful operational challenges as part of our Global team while developing specialized expertise in supply chain operations. As the person who executes service delivery for our clients, you have the unique opportunity to help your regional account team spot opportunities to improve and grow our customers’ business. You will be charged with helping Flexport account management teams and clients solve exceptional challenges in order to move their shipments in less time with lower costs and via improved productivity by your team, unblocking issues and establishing procedures to prevent them in the future.

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 Ocean or Air and LCL imports and exports.

• You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by leading business implementation and shipment execution for new clients and opportunities.
• You will gain specialist expertise within a mode or function and act as the first point of escalation for issue resolution (reactive) or program improvements (proactive, both internally and externally).
• You will be the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality: shipments move “on-time” and exceptions are handled appropriately. You will be responsible for ensuring your work satisfies internal KPIs and SLAs that demonstrate quality delivery.
• You will implement and test 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:

  • Be responsible for executing the end-to-end movement of ocean freight shipments within a regional network (both imports and exports), including intermodal movements.
  • Seamlessly coordinate day-to-day operations with internal and external partners such as ocean, intermodal and drayage vendors, the customs team and the Network Operations team.

• In Network teams you will:

  • Seamlessly coordinate the day-to-day supply operations with Air, LCL, Transload, Trucking, and Warehouse activities within your region.
  • Analyze data to rate subcontractor performance. Your analysis will inform subcontractor/carrier performance management initiatives.

Adaptive Responsibilities:

• You will help 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 participating in feedback loops to ensure client needs are met.
• You will use metrics to spot opportunities to improve and deliver great performance in your role, 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:

• Execute booking and documentation processes with clients /carriers
• Timely shipment troubleshooting and exception escalation / handling
• Work intimately with Flexport CSM, AOT team to ensure an effective end to end export process.
• Coach junior specialists on the daily job.
• Plan and execute special freight operations (i.e. DG, reefer, etc).
• Assist Sr. Associate on new business/process implementation, new projects and new tasks.
• Work intimately with Flexport CSM, AOT team to ensure an effective end to end export process.
• Support internal and external clients to make the best decision with your expertise;
• Live and act with integrity guided by the company values including sustaining a high bar for operational quality and service.
• Inform the business process and software capability needs to help scale our growing team while improving quality, service, efficiency and regulatory compliance.
• Contribute to the development and implementation of the procedure and system to differentiate Flexport operations from the industry.

What you will need:

Experience:

• BA/BS degree
• Minimum 3 years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, or consulting (ocean freight knowledge is a plus)

Mindset:

• Desire to “build a better machine” and get irritated when things aren’t optimal
• 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
• Next-level attention to detail

• 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.

Skills:

• Building and using your work process
• Optimizing processes analytically
• Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work
• Applying policy, process, and best practices
• Problem solving 3b: solving problems through hypothesis-based root cause analysis
• Problem Solving 3c: solving problems through theory and experimentation
• Generating ideas through data
• Building feedback loops for a product or service
• Executing complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities

Growth and development:

Skills you can advance in this role:

• All of the above +
• Designing processes
• Investigating and trouble shooting the customer’s problem
• Execute complex princesses without missing adaptive opportunities
• Problem solving 4: Building consensus among people with strong, differing opinions
• Forming hypothesis and developing experiments
• Framing problems
• Solving problems through hypothesis-based root cause analysis

What you will learn:

• You will learn what it takes to lead small teams in the execution of day-to-day tactical tasks.

• You will learn how to thrive in an ambiguous environment, research and test 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 logistics 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.
• 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.
• Team leadership. You learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team members on skill development.

Skill Glossary

Building and using your work process

A process is a step by step approach you can use to outline your work. It’s easy to mistake a process for a milestone. Milestones are time restricted goals. For example, when writing a book, a milestone could be to complete the first draft of the book in four months. This is different from the process for writing each chapter, which might comprise a few steps. For example, the first step is to compile stories, evidence, and data; the second step is to organize each of those elements, etc. Any type of work can have a process like this. An engineer’s process, for instance, includes understanding the product requirements, building a fast mockup, and creating the data model, among others. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the top comedians of all time, has a process where he tries to write five jokes every day. His goal isn't to write five funny jokes, just five jokes (whether they're good or bad). Creating a process is not only about tactical performance. You can think of a process like a product that is continuously being improved. For example, when writing Primed to Perform, Lindsay and Neel adapted their process as they learned what did and did not work.

Fluency in this skill typically includes:

• Building a process to help you do high quality work.
• Breaking up your work into small daily chunks of activity that guide you towards your vision and plan.
• Checking in with colleagues or leaders throughout the process.
• Adapting your process as you learn.
• Designing each chunk of work to be useful in driving a learning our outcome.
• Following the 'pencils-down' principle so that if you were asked to stop your work at any time, what you have would be useful to your customer.
• Using technology to help you manage your process.
• Habitually creating processes for any large body of work.