STAR Questions Flashcards
Tell me about a time you used reports and data to solve a problem
In 2022 I came onboard Nisolo. This was a year we experienced the highest growth in the company’s history. We grew 100% YoY that year and our order backlog was well outside our standard SLAs and customer commitments. We didn’t have proper systems in place to truly understand what our staffing should be and our warehouse was at near capacity for storage. Stored inventory was all over the place and it was causing a bottleneck in picking and packing efficacy due to the lack of egress and product location visibility. I was tasked with stabilizing operations to ensure we had the adequate amount of headcount to offset inbound, outbound, and returns volumes while also maintaining budget adherence.
Because we didn’t truly understand our CPU we knew we needed to begin building historical reporting (which we never had) from the year to better understand what our inbound and outbound throughput really was. We knew by doing this we could achieve not only a unit per hour metric but also a cost per unit so that we could truly understand our real staffing needs and the budget impact of it.
I worked with a company to help build us a platform that integrated with our ERP to pull historical data in from the past 2 years, aggregate it, and give us our weekly and monthly inbound units, outbound units, and SKU velocity. By the doing this, we quickly understood what our staffing needed to be based on throughput and projected volumes and we were able to level load the operation across all departments. This also help create more efficiency in our operations as we were able to slot high velocity SKUs closer to the processing floor which in turn drove down our CPU and helped balance our operational expense. In 2023 we lowered labor over 25% with similar volumes due to our ability to leverage reporting, understand efficiency, and optimize our operation.
What sets you apart from other candidates?
I believe just my 18 years in this space working with both small and large teams. I understand how to scale an operation as well as how to use shared resources effectively in larger operations. I’m the type of person who doesn’t believe in bank hours and I like to be on the floor driving productivity and engagement. I’ve managed every faucet of a distribution center, worked cross functionally with planning, sales, and engineering teams to proactively staff and optimize operations based on forecasting and I have also always had a continuous improvement mindset. I have always believe that continuous improvement initiatives drive operational excellence and I think I bring a wealth of knowledge in that space as well as having the ability to look at an operation from a financial standpoint as well. I’ve created, managed, shared out and balance budgets and have deep understanding of departmental and site leveling P/Ls.
Describe a time where you handled in inclusion in a previous role
When we began staffing Nisolo in 2023 for high growth, we scaled our staffing by 50% to absorb additional inbound and outbound volumes. By doing this, we brought in leadership and hourly staff to build our teams. This included people with different backgrounds, races, and gender and even some who barely knew the primary language. Because of our diversity, it helped build a stronger team with stronger relationships. This gave us out of the box thinking as well as viewpoints from others’ experiences, personal and professional, that we may not have otherwise even thought about. I believe everything, whether that is our personal or professional lives, comes down to culture. How do we want the culture our our operation to reflect and we can’t get to culture without behavior. Our behavior, as a leadership team, should always reflect openness and respect. That begins and ends with leadership. I believe As leaders we should always strive for diversity in our workplace. It builds stronger relationships, brings new ideas to the table, and I believe creates a better environment for collaboration and teamwork to thrive. This is the model we used at TJX and Nisolo and continue to use today.
Describe a time where you made work place improvements in a previous role
While in my capacity as operations manager at Kuehne + Nagel…go into Kanban implementation and turnaround time for raw goods into finished goods
Name a time where you failed at work
While in my role as an operations manager during my very first peak season we were receiving reports for volumes that were higher than usual. Our goal was to ensure that we maintained internal on-time shipments for all orders throughout peak season and ensure the operation was staffed accordingly.
At that time, I felt the current team I had in place could handle the volumes and that my leadership team could get an additional 15-20% more out of each employee without raising our headcount. All we needed to do was motivate and push them to get it across the finish line.
Against reporting and mentorship suggestions we moved forward with that plan, ultimately failing, and quickly realizing that 2 weeks into peak season we were a rolling 2 days outside of our internal KPIs causing customer satisfaction issues and a domino affect to our order queue.
I remember coming in on a Saturday to reflect on root cause and how we got into this position and realized that if we do not use data to drive our decision we cannot effectively manage an operation. This was very early in my career as a manager and I learned several value lessons. Lean on those who have deep industry knowledge and be open to feedback, leverage data points to make critical business decisions, and always look a quarter ahead into the future and be able to zoom out. Current day I am glad to have been through those challenges as it has sharpened my operational acumen and I’ve only ever been successful because of failure so I am grateful but I am also very aware of how critical it is to strategical manage an operation and preparation plus data drive long term success
Describe a time you had to deal with a difficult colleague. How did you resolve it?
Speak to Joel and the co-managing relationship that was affected on the operations floor because of different management styles and direction. We walk in a glass house, employees see what we do at all time, it began to affect morale and operational success. We decided to meet and discuss the most critical business objectives. Listed out his initiatives as well as mine, looked at pros and cons of each, decided which signed more with our operational objectives and implemented the top three and managed to those. It created more direction and clarity in the operation while also built a collaborative working relationship that drove more operational success
Describe a time where you had to implement change. What hurdles did you face and how did you deal with them
What was a time you were challenged and how did you overcome it?
Explain working through Covid at TJX
Tell us about a time you had to make a difficult decision
Speak to the time we signed a contract with an outsourced vendor, needed to communicate to all Nisolo employees we’d be downsizing, and the amount of staff that ultimately impacted. Why was that decision made? It optimized our operations, opened up additional cash runway, increased the bottom line by decreasing operational expense, and gave Nisolo an automated system to track, manage, and ship inventory to end customers
