- Our People
Celebrating the Unstoppables
In the Celebrating the Unstoppables series we take a moment to acknowledge the work of some of our unstoppable team. DB SCHENKER Head of Operations Excellence, Australia and New Zealand, Andrew Conlon is always looking for ways to deliver beyond expectations.
DB SCHENKER Head of Operations Excellence, Australia and New Zealand, Andrew Conlon is always looking for ways to deliver beyond expectations.
In his role, he looks at improving operations through standardisation and continuous improvement, from implementations through to how we operate to make work as lean as possible and provide the customers with operations they can trust to get the job done in a cost-effective and efficient way.
Problem solving
One example of Andrew’s hard work was when there was a customer who was over-stocking, and had steady sales that were far short of the inbound shipments, but no means of turning the taps off on imports of product with over 1,000 containers in storage nationally. This came on the back of Covid disruptions and several back-to-back disasters affecting industry-wide transit across to WA.
With a lack of transport services and warehouse space availability, their orders backlogged, and inbound volumes began choking operations. Andrew and his team initiated several projects to run concurrently to locate space in a tight real estate market, provided additional resources for order processing, and transport solutions to get product into stores.
They secured off-site facilities to the main warehouses in three States on the east coast with additional staffing to run them, reconfigured the Warehouse Management System to handle these off-site facilities, and ran both a direct delivery and replenishment model back into the main warehouses.
Andrew and the team initiated additional and new carrier onboarding to push more volume into the network. They also ran three separate shifts to increase product flows, and we managed to clear the inbound container backlog, process and clear the backorders, and deliver the stock into stores.
Growth opportunities
Over more than 20 years, Andrew has held a number of roles within DB SCHENKER, including Regional Operations Manager, DC Manager, Operations Manager, and Operations Supervisor.
He liked that right from the start, there were clear career progression opportunities, which motivated him to put his best foot forward. There are also opportunities to work across a diversity of customer accounts and sites, which helped increase his knowledge and experience in a wide variety of industries.
DB SCHENKER has given Andrew the freedom to make decisions to suit the current and future needs of our operations and our customers.