Senior Manager Network Performance and Improvement - Asia

The Opportunity

The role of the Senior Manager Network Performance & Improvement is a critical part of making Flexport’s mission to make global trade easy for everyone a reality. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries. In this role, you will drive the performance and growth of our network in your respective region. You develop and execute a long term strategy on where and how flexport needs to serve our customers with the best possible proposition and optimal/competitive processes. Most importantly, you will play a pivotal role in building our future operating model at Flexport: allowing us to effectively scale to achieve our mission of making global trade easier for everyone.

This role is designed to develop and deploy a successful ground network infrastructure. The network is Flexport’s vital backbone for all Air, LCL and Road Network shipments. You will also be responsible for the overall quality of the network (ie. On time Performance, Damages, etc) You will need to develop processes from the ground-up, drive global standardisation, build tech requirements and implement systems to help drive efficiencies, and continually look for ways to improve network operations quality across your continent.

Tactical Responsibilities

As a Network Performance & Improvement leader, you are an expert in what is needed to execute the end-to-end movement of shipments in your continent, and across the globe.
• You will hire, coach and develop a high-performing team of data and process experts responsible for the end-to-end quality of our consolidated freight operations.
• You will prioritize the career progression of your team and build in the right dynamics for success of both the individuals and the group.
• You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by recommending and implementing supply chain solutions for new locations, clients and opportunities to SCO, TLM and account management teams.
• You will guard the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality: setting the right processes and metrics and providing support to our Gateway Operations leaders to ensure shipments move “on-time” and exceptions are resolved quickly and appropriately. You will be responsible for meeting internal KPIs and SLAs that demonstrate quality delivery in relevant business areas.
• You will work closely with your peers and Data Analytics team to set-up long term data optimisation modeling, run deep analysis on to reach the optimum for Flexport.
• You will work closely with your counterparts in the other regions to design, pilot, test and roll out new product lines, processes and tech initiatives, ensuring standardization and efficiency gains are achieved across all regional teams in line with our OKRs.
• Monitor and uphold Flexport’s quality assurance standards: Plan, execute, and oversee inspection of end-to-end shipment operations workflow, to ensure quality conformance to quality standards and stakeholder expectations
• Provide reports, analyses, and data-driven insights on reported quality issues to ensure issue resolution and future error-prevention. Propose improvements to suboptimal and nonconformance processes through quality excellence approaches such as value stream mapping and root cause analysis
• Develop new performance standards, taking inputs from cross-functional stakeholders and customer feedback, and generate insights for continuous improvement for implementation across all departments. Update company operational procedures to reflect such process changes.
• Provide training and support to Operations team on processes, quality standards and QA activities, to ensure company-wide quality performance
Adaptive Responsibilities
• You will work with gateway and global management to ensure the right metrics and data are in place to empower your regional team to deliver great performance.
• You will be responsible for monitoring and improving overall quality while maintaining a high level of client satisfaction.
• You will help design and implement operational infrastructure and procedures in the team you oversee while constantly identifying and executing on opportunities to realize optimal efficiency and productivity.
• You will empower your team to prioritize and align on key initiatives, experiment with the best ways to drive growth and maintain high on-the-job motivation.
• You will support the regional leadership and global management to build a growth plan for your own region
• You will build trusting relationships and strive for high satisfaction levels from the Client Solutions team. You will work with Account Management to design and iterate on effective feedback loops to ensure client needs are met.
• You will act as the regional strategic consultant to your global counterparts, product & engineering and the regional supply chain operations.
Experience

What you will need:
• BA/BS degree, MBA is a plus
Minimum 10+ years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, operations at a high growth organization, or consulting firm.
• Proven track record of successful program management, project management, continuous improvement, and ground-up process design.
• Strong Data Analytics skills and a firm understanding of how to turn data into action, driving measurable improvement in operations in collaboration with front line managers.
Mindset

We’re looking for folks that have:
• Excitement to manage relations and create a best-in-class operational structure
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams in day-to-day execution and continuous process improvement not only for your own team but also at a broader organizational level
• Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinker with strong problem-solving capabilities
• Strategic vision and ground floor execution
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills
• Client service mindset - obsessed with client and squad happiness
• A mastery of internal and external communication
Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!
• The desire to lead, train and develop up and coming industry talent
• A "compliance first" attitude to keep our regulators happy and enthusiastic about Flexport since we operate in a heavily regulated industry.
Skills
• Coaching your colleagues
• Encouraging your team to improve how the team works
• Helping your team learn from their performance outcomes
• Inspiring your team
• Engaging a customer with empathy and without bias
• Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work
• Building strategy through a customer viability lens
• Designing processes
• Leading difficult conversations
• Forming hypothesis and developing experiments
Communicating with structure (“A mastery of (internal) communication”)
Managing time and commitments (“Next-level attention to detail”)
• Investigating and troubleshooting the customer’s problem
• Execute complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities
• Applying policy, process, and best practices
• Organizing, leading, and participating in meetings
Skills You Can Advance In This Role

Growth and development:
• All of the above ++
• Leading your team’s adaptive performance process
• Setting a vision and theory of impact for a team
• Logos 1 consensus building
• Building consensus among people with strong, differing opinions
• Generating ideas by analyzing your competitors
• Diagnosing a client’s deeper needs
• Gathering qualitative and quantitative customer insight through experiments
What You Will Learn
• How to work cross-functionally to execute quickly and build a new organization, optimizing for scale and efficiency
• How to motivate teams and lead performance in an ambiguous environment, research and implement operational hypotheses and inform the strategy of a newly built team.
• You will gain the ability to continuously improve and expand our global network footprint.
Future Tracks This Role Could Lead To
• Becoming a leader of leaders. You learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team leaders on skill development.
• Deep expertise in a specific area of supply chain management. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy. You build processes and tools or lead webinars to amplify your knowledge.
Skill Glossary

• Coaching your colleagues

This skill is about coaching your team to drive impact through a process of on-the-job-apprenticeship. Coaching is a process that enables people to improve their performance over time. There are two components to performance—will and skill. Will is tomo, the driver of performance. Coaching, on the other hand, is about helping your colleagues grow in skill. This skill is about leading working teams (i.e., at least 5 individual contributors), not whole organizations (i.e., at least three levels from the customer, with over 100 people).

Fluency In This Skill Typically Includes
Ensuring your team members choose their own skills to develop (i.e., skill goals).
Having monthly skill development discussions (e.g., the 20:10 meeting where you spend 20 minutes helping your team member with their skill goals, and 10 minutes with your team member helping you).
• Planning on-the-job opportunities with your team members to make progress on their skill goals.
• Routinely annotating feedback and next steps for your team's skill goals.
• Teaching colleagues how to use you as a coach: namely by encouraging them to talk to you about where they have and have not had impact, what skills they can improve, and how they can go about learning those skills.
Providing your colleagues with continuous advice and positive reinforcement (e.g., telling them what they have been doing well).