Thanks for joining Jeff, could you tell us a bit more about what you do?
In essence, my team’s goal is to make sure that Supply Chain has the right suppliers in place to support our business. We work closely with internal stakeholders, like Engineering, Quality and Operations, listen to their needs and evaluate which suppliers can best deliver what’s needed. Then we monitor the performance of our suppliers and look for areas that need improving. Things we source can vary greatly, from specialist mechanical products like castings and composite tubes for our TLS products, through to specialist electrical products and services, like cameras for our Intelligent Transport Solutions division, built-to-print circuit boards and electrical box-builds, right down to off the shelf components.
How did you land this role at SEA?
I started my career as an Apprentice Production Engineer and studied for a foundation degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering. It provided a good technical background, but I didn’t love it. What I discovered instead, was that I was more interested in process improvement and overall organisational behaviours, rather than the technical aspects of manufacturing. So, I moved on to a role in quality assurance in the aerospace industry. As this was a customer-facing role, it gave me valuable insight into needs and expectations of Tier One customers, and what was needed to exceed those expectations.
That experience made me shift my focus, I developed a good jack-of-all trades skillset, and I decided I really wanted to sit on the other side of the fence, become the voice of the customer and leverage my expertise to help suppliers not only meet, but exceed industry standards. Unfortunately, finding a role like that isn’t easy because they generally don’t exist.
I then I saw a Junior Buyer position being advertised at SEA. I saw the potential for this role, and where SEA was going in terms of growth. In the interview, I made it very clear what my career aspirations were, and the value I could bring to the role. Of course, no immediate guarantees were made, but we did agree there was potential for a role like mine to open up in the future. After about a year, my manager Ben pushed for the role to be created, and I applied for it, and that’s why I’m here now.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
Well, I don’t think anyone has ever said: “I want to be a Supplier Development Engineer when I grow up”, so there isn’t really a direct path. but I can speak about my route into the role. Scarily, I have been in the world of manufacturing for almost 24 years. In that time, I’ve learnt a lot and become a jack of all trades. That has set me up nicely for this role, particularly my career in quality which touched on all aspects of how a business should work.
Early in my career, I was exposed to the principles of Six Sigma, which is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement, which I’d recommend looking into. It’s all about reducing variability because variability leads to problems, i.e. If you do the exact same thing in the same way every time, the result will be the same. Six Sigma even has an equation for this, y=f(X)+e.
I would also recommend looking into the principles of Lean Manufacturing, which looks at process improvement more from a perspective of reducing waste and explaining what waste is in a different way to how we think of it day to day. I apply these fundamental principles every day, and they’re very interesting to me.
Another skill you need is problem-solving, there are a lot of challenges to address on a day-to-day basis.
What kind of challenges do you come across?
Eventually, everything that’s happened in a project leads into Supply Chain, so any lateness, errors and resource constraints all become amplified because they come to one point, which is what we’re sending out the door. Often, problems get noticed at that stage, which means we do a lot of firefighting at the Supply Chain stage. This can unfortunately funnel our focus on what’s urgently needed rather than what would benefit us long-term. This can be frustrating as we always want to make things better.
The silver lining is, that SEA really recognise this, and we’re moving forward to improve that. As a company, we’re actively simplifying our processes and looking for better ways to get things done. We’re getting better at prioritising what’s important rather than just what’s urgent.
Since I’ve started in Supply Chain, we’ve also had some ridiculous global events that impacted our role. Whenever I tell people what year I joined Supply Chain, they just laugh. Things like the pandemic have caused massive lead time issues for electrical components, some of which are still an issue today. The situation in Ukraine has also caused challenges with the supply of metal and chemicals that we use in multiple different parts.
Unfortunately, it’s very tricky to plan for these events, as they’re quite literally unprecedented and unpredictable because of that. Therefore, we have to be agile and novel in addressing these challenges when they come up.
You joined us almost four years ago, what made you stay with us all this time?
Improving processes is what I like to do, I’m always looking for a better way to do things, and I get a lot of satisfaction from that. It’s also rewarding to working with the other members of the team, they’re a good bunch, and we bounce off each other. Although one of my colleagues has recently coined the phrase ‘It’s just Jeff things’, in response to the fact I sometimes approach things “a little differently”, which I’m not too sure about!
Jokes aside, at the end of the day, I’m not a big careerist. All I want is for things to be a bit better today than they were yesterday. SEA offers the opportunity to achieve that while working with people I like to work with, that’s what keeps me here.
Thanks Jeff!
