Global Operations Associate - Partner Performance

The opportunity:

The role of the Global Operations Associate is a critical part of Flexport's mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it a reality. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries. In this role, your direct customers are the partners within your region: our account management and customs teams, subcontractors, carriers, terminals, and trucking providers. Your work directly supports Flexport’s partners in achieving their logistics goals.

This role is designed to guide our partners providing best-in-class customer service experience monitoring their performance against SLAs, pave the way to improve our technology stack and work towards commercial goals.

In this role you will be the main contact for partners streamlining processes ensuring smooth operations on both ends and have the opportunity to foster collaboration with our partner.

Tactical Responsibilities:

As a Global Operations Associate, you are an expert in executing the end-to-end movement of shipments within a regional network including Ocean LCL imports and exports and have the tools to monitor that partners do the same.

• You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by ensuring that our partner takes care of shipments against agreed SLAs.
• You will gain management expertise and act as the first point of escalation for issue resolution (reactive) or program improvements (proactive, both internally and externally).
• You will be the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality delivered by our partner.
• You will implement and test scalable operational infrastructure and procedures to ensure partners are delivering the highest levels of efficiency and productivity for our customers. If they are not, you will look for opportunities to improve them.
• You will be the focal point for the partner on a daily basis sharing news and leverage Flexport resources to ensure that partners are set up for success.

Adaptive Responsibilities:

• You will help build and implement operational infrastructure and procedures in the day-to-day workflow, while constantly identifying and executing opportunities to realize optimal efficiency and productivity.
• You will empower Account Management by participating in feedback loops to ensure client needs are met.
• You will use metrics to spot opportunities to improve and deliver great performance in your role, including data quality and shipment milestone timeliness.
• You will act as a consultant to your regional team, product & engineering and the operations excellence team on ocean supply chain operations.

Scope of Duties:

Partner Performance Management; regularly review with partner past performance, identify improvement opportunities by drilling deep into historic data.Point of contact with partners; keep yourself updated with most recent events and engage pro-actively with partners on how to find the right solution.

• Ready-to-ship gatekeeper; ensure partners keep our system up-to-date, so that we can refer to one source of truth when evaluating data and manage our customers.
• Shipment life-line executioner/monitor; ensure partners are on top of shipment plans and report actual milestones on time.
• Control tower; Report any exceptions and activate recovery plan to senior management on partner side and salvage service commitment if needed

Exert commercial control; auditing service fees and bills to ensure that commercial agreements are correctly executed.Coaching; if new processes or a new partner is implemented you will familiarize yourself with the SOP and ensure that the partner is set up for success.

What you will need:

Experience:

• BA/BS degree
• Minimum 1-3 years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, or consulting (ocean freight knowledge is a plus)

Mindset:

• Desire to “build a better machine” and get irritated when things aren’t optimal
• Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinking with strong problem-solving capabilities
• Strategic vision and ground floor execution
• Excitement to manage vendor relations and create best-in-class, innovative structures to do so
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills
• A client service mindset; you are obsessed with client and squad happiness
• Next-level attention to detail
• Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!

• Flexibility to get the job done when needed. Willing to work outside office hours and occasional weekend or night shifts in certain locations.

Skills:

• Building and using your work process
• Optimizing processes analytically
• Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work
• Applying policy, process, and best practices
• Generating ideas through data
• Building feedback loops for a product or service
• Executing complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities

Growth and development:

Skills you can advance in this role:

• All of the above +
• Designing processes
• Investigating and troubleshooting the customer’s problem
• Execute complex princesses without missing adaptive opportunities
• Problem-solving 4: Building consensus among people with strong, differing opinions
• Forming hypotheses and developing experiments
• Framing problems
• Solving problems through hypothesis-based root cause analysis

What you will learn:

• You will learn what it takes to lead small teams in the execution of day-to-day tactical tasks.
• You will learn how to thrive in an ambiguous environment, research and test operational hypotheses, and inform the strategy of a newly built team.

• You will gain specialist expertise to become an ocean or network operations and intermodal subject matter expert within the company. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy.
• You will gain the ability to continuously improve the client experience through a deep industry understanding. You are singularly positioned to realize how we can both work within and push the logistics industry forward to meet the standards of Flexport’s client-centric service.

Future tracks this role could lead to:

• Procurement or other expert roles require 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 will have built processes and tools or led webinars, amplifying your knowledge.
• Client advisor/ account management. Your deep passion for growing our customers’ business sets you on a path to becoming their advocate and representative at Flexport.
• Team leadership. You learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team members on skill development.