Our warehouse management system isn't very smart. It also doesn't help that most of our data is not managed by us as it is managed externally. This creates many data problems because the people inputting the data aren't familiar with the product and can easily mess up things. Also the speed at which we are able to solve these problems is very slow due to the massive time difference.

Our facility was constantly showing a very low utilization rate in our warehouses - about 30% overall. We were getting a lot of pressure from corporate to carry more material on hand because surely we have the space, or decrease our trailer pool to save costs because we have the space. This wasn't the case, so I decided to build my own warehouse utilization tool.

The most important element in this tool was its ability to be dynamic. In other words, all items aren't created equally. Cartons can be stacked 3 high, RSCs can be stacked 4 high, film can range anywhere between 2-6 high, and so on. The problem is our warehouse management system isn't able to recognize the true max capacity of a bay row depending on what item it is. If the item in the bay row has a true stack height of 3 and length of 15 pallets, the 100% utilization should be 45. However, our system would usually assume 4 as the height for all bay rows which was throwing individual location utilization percentages off by as much as 50%. The pie chart of our warehouse looks something like 70% of all footprints are bay rows, 20% racking, and 10% pushbacks. When you compound utilization being off by upwards of 50% for 70% of all the footprints in the warehouse, you can see why our number was so low.

After implementing this and a couple of other new features, I was able to get our warehouse utilization percentage to see over 100% higher than previous. We usually patrol between 70-82% utilization and we have determined that anything above 85% increases the risk of accidents and decreases the ability for our warehousing team to do their jobs effectively.

I was apart of the team who helped bring the first recyclable film in the CPG snacks industry.

More specifically, I was the planner who was ordering all the different variants of the material, and setting up run schedules to best optimize our tests while maintaining normal product output.

We were the first facility to start the tests, and after we had figured out the right variant of film and right parameters for the system running the material, we were the experts in the field.

I was asked to develop rollout strategies to a couple other General Mills facilities. I was also the liaison between the supplier of the film and all the other facilities. It was basically a psuedo buyer role as I was putting together RFQ's, prioritizing orders, mitigating supply risk, and many other things.

This project in total won the Champions Award at General Mills for 2020. This is the most prestigious yearly award for the company.

A couple of our systems use a dynamic tool developed by corporate that is suppose to optimally change processing and packaging rates based on the products that are running at that time. It's very complex, and I still don't really understand it.

However, we were noticed that these rates were really under scheduling production which was going to cause some major issues on getting materials on time. We were constantly running ahead of schedule which forced planners to scramble and pull up orders. This was fine until orders became within lead time, which decreased our chances of getting the order on time, and overall cost the company more money as they had to pay expediting fees or break in fees to transportation and suppliers.

However, running ahead wasn't really seen as an issue to some of our superiors. Running below schedule on the other hand was always met with immediate questioning. It was difficult for us to get our point across as a planning group because the business loved when our systems performed well.

I decided I had to dig into the data and present it before we run into a major issue not getting material that will cause major downtime.

I pulled some data and found out on one system we were nearly running 4% per day ahead of schedule which didn't seem like much. But 3% every day for a week is 21% which is basically running almost 1.5 days ahead of schedule per week! Compound that by 52 weeks and your looking at 78 days per year ahead of schedule.

I also had to pull some data showing our PO changes and the dramatic difference between the number of orders being pulled in vs pushed out compared to prior years. Working with transportation, I was able to get an estimate of how much we were paying in expediting fees.

Presenting all this data to our Supply Chain Manager was able to get our point across of the faulty tool. It also raised awareness to not being okay with running x percent ahead of schedule.

I was interested in what the decision making process was when it came to ordering materials in full truck loads or not. Planners don't really have a ton of visibility to costs (transportation cost, storage cost, pricing tiers, etc), so this decision making process intrigued me.

Turns out most of it was made on gut feel or ordering requirements from suppliers.

I looked at about two years of past data across all of our materials that we order and started to look for patterns. In theory, we want to order as many full truck loads as possible because a) it gives us better pricing and b) it gives us more reliable delivery.

A couple of the trends I saw
-Items ordered in full truck loads that sat around in the warehouse forever
-Items ordered in LTL's that were ordered too frequently
-Items ordered in LTL's because it takes forever to use a small amount
-Items ordered in full truck loads because the runs were unpredictable.

I was able to make these trends into actionable insight. For example one sku I was able to get the business to run bi-monthly instead of monthly because we could still have a healthy days of supply, while also cutting our transportation costs in half. I was able to free up about 10% more of the warehouse and implement a "cost per pallet per day" metric which was dynamically priced depending on the utilization of the warehouse in order to give planners visibility on if they should really order a full truck load or not. I implemented full truck load and LTL targets for each system in our monthly calls with our corporate team to make sure we are always paying attention.

As an intern, the main part of the role was to work collaboratively with the other interns at facilities located across the US to come up with a program that would be able to be used network wide for identifying aging packaging materials. Wow that was a run-on.

At first it seemed like a fun project until we all realized how different facility processes are even though they are all General Mills facilities. One person decided to try and take control of the group and become the leader. That person was well liked, could speak well, had reasonable ideas.

Well, the group was quickly falling apart after the second week as the direction was weak and the communication was poor. I decided to take matters into my own hands quietly. I had designed the frontend of the program in my free time as I thought it was important for everyone to have a vision of what was actually possible. The frontend soon became the backend as I was on a roll and could visualize the final program.

Next meeting, I kind of hijacked the meeting to show everyone what I had been working on. After showing off the really rough design and functionality of the program, it was clear that gears started turning for people. The rest of that meeting was riffing on the design and discussing the different processes that would have to be implemented for different facilities to get the same end result. For example, not all facilities had the same reports with the same information so it couldn't be standardized.

It became clear that I became the impromptu leader on the group, and it was great because there weren't any hurt feelings. We were all working towards the same goal and now we all had something to rally with.

The next steps were clear. Figure out which facilities had similar processes and group them together to build out the functionality. Once we had everyone create their version of the macro, we looked for commonality between them all and condense those processes together. When it came to outside of the box things for certain facilities, it became easy to write some simple if formulas that would allow the macro to auto-adjust itself to deal with the respective plant at hand.

The 10 week internship consisted of 8 weeks of working on this project, but really ended up being 6 as we didn't get much done the first two weeks.

We were able to present this to our corporate sponsors in which they were able to run the program individually or in total to instantly identify savings. Over $1,000,00 of savings became instantly visible to the company. 8/9 interns were offered a full time role as a result of this project.

I interned at Colony Brands from June-December of 2018. It was only supposed to be the summer, but about a month in, my supervisor left the company. I was basically shadowing him for the month that I was there, so I was appointed to the Interim Inbound Operations Supervisor. Turns out I was doing something right as the company asked me to stay through the winter full time and take the semester off. I ended up doing so as the opportunity was too good to pass up, and I knew I could graduate in 3.5 years if I worked hard.

Anyways, towards the end of my time there, the facility manager set up a contest open for anyone to redesign the warehouse floor plan. I didn't have any prior experience at the company, but I was told that safety incidents were rising year over year and so was the amount of items we were taking in. Pretty soon there was going to be a breaking point and the facility manager wanted to get out ahead of it.

Over 20 people entered their floor plan design into the contest. Most of the people that had entered had a decade or more experience with the company, and only me and two other interns decided to give it a shot.

My floor plan was very detailed as it showed before and after versions that clearly laid out the benefits. Whether it be a reduction in high risk areas, more storage capacity, or more efficient flow of product.

I think many people ended up just submitting what they thought was best from their experience without actually analyzing the impact. My floor plan ended up winning and that was a fun last month seeing the plans get set in motion to tear down racking, repaint pedestrian paths, and much more. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see the project completed in its entirety, but I was able to see it virtually.

I worked for a local paint store in high school that did 100% of its business brick & mortar. I always asked why we didn't sell online, and it made sense. Paint is heavy, paint can easily be damaged, paint is messy, color is subjective, and a lot more reasons.

Finally, boss created an Amazon account and told me to see what we could do.

Started off selling brushes, rollers, and other accessories that were easy to ship so we could perfect the process. Then we started to up our packaging game with super sturdy boxes, industrial tape, foam caps, air pocket machine, and much more. Stain was next because the color was pre-mixed - there was no way for us to mess up the formula.

Turns out we had a product that everyone wanted around the U.S. and couldn't seem to find it anywhere else. It absolutely flew off our shelves. The marketplace ended up scaling from $0 to $2m in revenue over 3 years.

Worked with Ink who is building a decentralized social media platform for web3.

-Competitive analysis
-Recommended feature suite
-Monetization plan
-UI Design
-Tokenomics
-Moderation protocol
-Roadmap development