Make It and Ship It
By Ed. Filed in Business, Life, Technology |
Before I left the retail franchise in California, I became good friends with several of the other managers and we still stay in touch. It has been 3 years since I was learning my way around San Francisco and digging into the new position with the company. If I had known that the investors were going to give my boss the boot, I would have made a bigger effort to stay with the company. But I wasn’t privy to those plans and I left while I was ahead of the game.
Since the big management change, the only two people still there in management positions are two of my friends, Robin, their Director of Training, and Lydia, the Director of Logistics. Actually, when I was still there, she was the Warehouse Manager. But her hard work and dedication to running the warehouse resulted in a tidy promotion for her.
We chat on the weekends and exchange emails once in a while. I’m glad to see that Lydia is doing well and that the company is slowly turning around from the financial disaster that the CEO and COO had caused before they were kicked to the curb. She has reorganized the manufacturing and shipping, and is currently tackling the inventory control aspects of her Director of Logistics duties.
While I was there, the COO was determined to procure two new locations for manufacturing and warehousing, and we had several high level meetings about where to locate the properties to best serve the franchisees with quick turn around. But Lydia has found a better way to meet their needs. She wants to outsource the fulfillment and keep the manufacturing in San Francisco to keep costs down.
I agree with her that outsourcing Order Fulfillment makes better financial sense from a personnel standpoint and from a capital expense standpoint. She has even located a company to work with, AMS Fulfillment. She gave me their web site address and asked me to check it out for her. From what I can tell, she picked a winner.