Day in the Life: Sam, Logistics Operations Manager

The busiest day of the quarter is the day the old way of planning used to break.

Sam manages operations for a regional distribution centre, and the problem was not the quiet days. It was that demand, routing, and a thousand small decisions all peaked at once, by hand, on the day a mistake cost the most. A late truck before a long weekend is not one late truck. It is a chain of missed drops, overtime, and customers who remember.

This morning the forecast is on his screen before he is, built from the live order book rather than last year’s guess, with the lines likely to run short flagged for an early pick. The run sheets are routed and balanced across the fleet.

Mid-morning a truck goes down on the highway with a full load. The re-plan is back before Sam has finished reading the breakdown report. Which drops move to which vehicles, what slips to tomorrow, who needs a call. He checks it, adjusts two stops he knows the system cannot know about, and sends it.

What he is not doing is refreshing a screen to see whether the tool is still up. It runs on infrastructure that is watched, with fallbacks underneath it, so a hard day stays a hard day and does not turn into a hard day with the planning system down on top of it. When something upstream is slow, it says so while there is still time to act.

By the end of the day the weekend’s orders are out, the short lines were covered first, and the one genuine problem had a person on it within minutes. Any system copes on a quiet Tuesday. This one holds on the day a failure would cost the most, and that is the day that pays for the rest.

Aroha runs a not-for-profit on a far smaller team and leans on the same reliability. Her day is here.