When I graduated, I was given another 2-month chance, this time, to prove my worth as a Procurement Analyst. Since I didn't have prior experience in the field, my first task would be to shadow the current process with the intent to identify bottlenecks and free up capacity for Business Unit leads that also doubled as Category Leads in our Matrix structure. Once I understood and analysed the process flow, I convinced another colleague to help me build a macro using VBA for Excel. The model absorbed all the manual 'copy-pasting' work and reduced time spent by 95%, thus allowing the Business Unit leads to spend more time interpreting business results and making recommendations. My 2-month contract grew to a year's worth of experience and I was able to work on some other cool things like:
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Managing a Category of Ingredients
As I grew more confident in my role, I was handed the responsibility of taking over management of an ingredient category - salt. I consolidated Specification sheets and sent out a Request for Proposal. I also analysed the responses and made my recommendations on awarding businesses.
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Building a Pipeline of Productivity
I helped consolidate different sources of data containing ideas to increase productivity and moved it to a cloud-based solution. By using Google's G Suite, I was able to build a dynamic solution to capture, store and present the data. This mitigated the need for version control and made sure that there was 'one source of accurate truth' that was accessible to the business in real time. As a result, the team blew expectations out of park by delivering over 3X historical productivity benchmarks.
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Making the Dream work, through Team Work
Based on my demonstrated ability to own a creative technological solution I was approached by the VP of IT to collaborate on an in-house solution that would immediately free-up up to $1 Million in working capital for the organization. What was initially a part-time commitment, grew into a role where I would own this platform and move to IT to focus all my efforts on creating more business solutions.