When confronted with a new role at work, I often review the existing instructions, procedures, and templates. Frequently, I have found them out-of-date and involving wasteful steps. To pass on things better than I found them, I try to leave an impact through making process improvements and updating those documents.

As I've been looking for my next role, I've had to think about what my "ideal job" might look like. I've also had to think about what my "superpower" is: what I uniquely bring to a hiring organization. I don't know that I have a complete answer, but I reached a few conclusions recently. My ideal job is to take on a broken-but-fixable organization and bring it to where it doesn't need heroism to survive day-to-day. My superpower is to create the organizational bandwidth to make that happen.

Or Some Principles I’ve Learned the Hard Way

In addition to continuing my series on tools that I've built or used to make life easier, this post also lets me associate a blog post with every accomplishment on my resume for the past two roles. This project spanned a year of iteration and improvements as we turned chaos into data and then data into actual improvements. Previous posts in this series:  Overlap tool Follow-up through Outlook, OneNote, and To Do RFQ / CBF SAP tool Change Board Shortage report Small business Square/Google Sheets integration   Headline: 3,000 parts / 11,000 purchase requisitions tracked The purchase-requisition tracker ended up as one of the most iterative projects I've worked on so far. It started with a senior-management directive to quantify how many purchase orders we were late to place, and develop a burn-down plan for those past-due orders. At this company, our SAP system would review all demand for a part (assemblies that used the part, orders, safety-stock, etc.) and all supply for...

Update schedule change: I'm on hiatus next week and my next post will be April 21.   This is the latest of a series of posts about tools I've built or used to make life easier. I've iterated on these sorts of tools several times, and this particular tool started life as a method to stop SAP from logging me off and losing my information and then evolved into a tool that others could use for complete reporting. Previous posts in the series: Overlap tool Follow-up through Outlook, OneNote, and To Do RFQ / CBF SAP tool Change Board All of these tools in their current iterations are the property of my former employer, but I built them once and I could build them again. This shortage report included Excel formulas, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, and SAP macros. Headline improvement: from 2 years past-due to within 90 days of on-time delivery In late 2023, my boss's boss asked me to help out on analyzing and expediting one of our largest military products. Land...

This is the third of a series of posts about tools I've built or used to make life easier. The request for quote (RFQ) / competitive bid file (CBF) file was the result of two different projects which a) took a list of all parts and potential suppliers for customer request for proposal, b) created RFQs for every part/supplier combination, c) enabled easy data-entry of quotes when they came back, and d) uploaded everything to our SAP system so that we had a single central database of all RFQ and quote information and the ability to convert those quotes to purchase orders. All of these tools in their current iterations are the property of my former employer, but I built them once and I could build them again. This tool included Excel formulas, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, and SAP macros. Headline improvement: 98% touch-time reduction

This is the first of a series of posts about tools I've built to make life easier. The overlap tool was the first one I built to include SAP code. All of these tools in their current iterations are the property of my former employer, but I built them once and I could build them again. This one in particular was bugging me a few weeks before I was laid off, where I was thinking that I would build it completely differently because of what I know now. Headline improvement: 1 week of effort to 5 minutes (99.8%) In 2022-ish, I was the Senior Manager for Work Transfer. I had a team of six Work Transfer Mangers who were handed business plans for dual-sourcing or re-sourcing a collection of part numbers and then charged with executing those transfers within the required timeline and avoiding any gap in supply. This meant that the managers needed to see the number of parts in-stock at our company, incoming supply from the incumbent and future sources, and the timing and quantity of an...