Derek is a Organizational Development Consultant with JB Hunt Transport, Inc., a Fortune 500 freight shipping services company. Although he started in an internal operational position with the company, Derek now works with JB Hunt’s clients and customers to help resolve their own logistical issues, which will benefit both parties in the long run. He tells interested students to learn how to communicate with all tiers of a company, from the trucking department up to the executive level.
Transcript
My name's Derrick Roy, and I'm a consultant for a supply chain logistics company. Supply chain is the complex way organizations move things from point A to point B. It's the behind-the-scenes operation behind every major retailer, every piece of material used in construction, it's basically the infrastructure that supports the way we move things in the United States. So immediately after graduating from the MBA program in 2013 I started with the company J.B. Hunt Transport in operations. And so just an hour away of the campus in Danbury, Connecticut, I managed a team of truck drivers that were delivering groceries 24/7 into the grocery stores outside New York City Metro. About a year into that role, was promoted into the account manager position. And then ultimately moved into organizational development consulting internally. And so what that meant was I facilitated conversations and managed projects across the country, all the way from defining the problem, to measuring it, analyzing it, improving upon the implementation or the pilot, and then controlling for it after the fact, a model that I learned here at Western Connecticut State. In my current role, I'm an external organizational development consultant, which means I do something similar in the sense that I facilitate a conversation around how to solve large problems within supply chain, except now I'm doing it outside the company with our future customers, as part of a sales process, or existing customers as needed. I worked on a project recently where the organization was experiencing some problems in profitability, particularly in the labor side of the equation. Said otherwise, the specifics yielded unfavorable results for the organization's bottom line. And so they brought in a small group of folks that I was honored to lead, and we started with simply analyzing the data. We wanted to better understand where the pain points were, what was causing the organization some pain. And so we analyzed multiple reports. We interviewed key stake-holders, and presented our findings in a current analysis, if you will, that included some historical context to the folks that had nominated this team. And so based on how that conversation went, we identified next the series of steps we might take in order to test or implement a pilot program that might solve some of those challenges.
Download transcript