Advisor Program Management

Owner of flawless program execution and optimization for owned customer programs in South Asia, working with regional team members throughout the network to ensure that customer solutions are well-socialized and delivered in a way that exceeds customer expectations.   Responsible for customer stabilization, retention, and optimization, you will orchestrate the South Asia operations team to ensure stability in the customer experience. You will establish clear KPI’s and SLA’s for defined customer programs, ensuring clarity of understanding and program execution expectations. You will be the most elevated operational escalation path for the customer. 

You will own the South Asia strategic operational roadmap for your customer(s), prioritizing and balancing the opportunities for greatest impact to the bottom line, while relentlessly driving optimization of the customer program across active geographies. As South Asia Program Manager, you will work in partnership with the South Asia Account Director/Manager, to drive the elevation of the overall customer experience with APLL. 

You will enlist your creativity to remove barriers and drive solutions that strengthen our customer partnerships, while working in partnership with your community of program management and product management peers. You will share best practice, while contributing to strategic South Asia projects and initiatives that are intended to drive innovation and efficiency within the way that APL Logistics delivers solutions to our customer community.

You will serve as a mentor and coach to your team, helping to aid in their growth, professional development and continued successful contribution to the customer program. 

You will work in close partnership with the entire Key Account Management team to ensure achievement of the overall goals, objectives and budget results for your customer.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the dotted line leader of regional program management resources that are also attached to your owned customer. 
• Support South Asia teams with the guidance, resources and planning needed to deliver Service Excellence customer objectives.
• Attract, retain, develop and coach APLL workforce both direct and dotted line reports.
• Lead cross-functional support teams for assigned projects in order to achieve successful outcomes for APLL client-related projects. 
• Serve as a mentor/coach for program management team resources, sharing optimal approaches to take to elevate the defined program and resulting customer experience.
• Drive collaboration amongst internal and external partners that have a part to play in delivery of defined customer program (key suppliers, transportation partners, internal IT team, product team, etc.)
• Understand APLLs services in order to ensure that, from your vantage point, you can identify potential business opportunities to share with the key account team to pursue.
• Continuous evaluation of client facing work scope and activities to assure maximum value and resource efficiency.
• Proactively identify trends, process improvements and customer needs (in particular through best practice sharing within peer network), proposing and implementing solutions with the customer, KAM and Operations teams as appropriate.
• Serve as an internal Operations escalation and KAM support for any process related question, problem or other issue related to merchandise flow.
• Regional view of the operational program delivery and associated impact to customers strategic goals and objectives
• Owner of regional operational roadmap for existing and future forward program implementation and delivery
• Relentlessly focus upon mission of program delivery, ensuring no disruption/no distractions to execution of South Asia customer program and flow of merchandise
• Driver of KPI delivery for the Regional customer program, ensuring that metrics which tell a story are monitored and actioned
• Remove any barriers to program execution; relentlessly escalating with purpose of swift issue resolution
• Orchestrate local team regarding program optimization, efficiency gains, and new program implementation
• Derive new approaches to persistent issues if current solutions do not solve for them; suggest alternatives where beneficial to customer
• Facilitate best practice sharing amongst community of peers, in an effort to incorporate learnings from other account programs into relevant facets of owned customer program
• Drive collaboration amongst internal and external partners that have a part to play in delivery of defined customer program (key suppliers, transportation partners, internal IT team, product team, etc.)
• Drive the establishment and implementation of procedures for newly defined programs while also defining and driving improvements within existing programs.
• Establish a process to ensure business continuity and coverage in cases where program management team members are promoted, move along to other challenges or are absent for an extended period.
• Establish metrics to monitor Data Accuracy to ensure that clean data is available in order to deliver accurate KPI reporting to both internal and external customers. Work with SME’s to identify root cause for overall improvement.
• Identify recurring internal process failures/ redundancies/ problems, resolving these with the respective process owner (i.e. systems, Asia Ops, etc.).
• Define the most appropriate KPI’s that will enable proper decision-making and analysis while also highlighting opportunities for improvement.
• Partner with Key Account Manager/Key Account Director to conduct regular business reviews with the customer, consistently ensuring that our development plans align with their dynamic goals and objectives.
• Partner with Key Account Manager/Director to aid in the development of overall customer value proposition and proposed program solution design.
• Conduct regular business reviews (MBR/QBR/YBR) with key accounts, review service & KPI performance, supply chain effectiveness, identify opportunities to improve efficiency and propose solutions.

Qualifications

• Minimum five years of relevant international transportation/logistics experience.
• Minimum five years of experience involving direct customer interaction.
• Strong background in logistics for Retailers / FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) type of companies
• Transportation industry knowledge, ideally to include understanding of international order management
• Creative problem solving skills 
• Ability to learn new systems and software quickly.
• Knowledge and experience of databases and MS Office applications
• Basic understanding of IT and Data Structures
• Ability to engage and establish relationship with different levels and different culture
• Commitment to teamwork and collaboration
• Strong customer focus
• Excellent listening and communication skills
• Creative and Innovative – always challenging the status quo and looking for improvements
• Proactive and persistent
• Commitment to seeing projects through to the end
• Great sense of detail
• Analytical
• Good organization and time/priority management
• Understanding of Supply Chain Processes such as Freight Forwarding, Consolidation, Transportation, etc.
• Capability to apply structured logic to analyze/resolve complex problems
• Ability to adhere to APL Logistics travel policy