Describe a significant career accomplishment that you found particularly rewarding

“Well thank you Brock, for showing us how to eliminate your position.”


As odd as that sentence may sound, hearing that sentence from my boss’s boss, the VP of Finance and Business Development, is my most significant career accomplishment.

I currently work for England Logistics, a Third Party Logistics Company that has gone from 18th in 2007 on Transport Topics’ List of Freight Brokerage Firms to 11th in 2010. We are a $237 million dollar a year company.

I was hired as a credit and claims analyst to process credit requests and claims, but also to tackle inefficiencies in our credit and claims processes. When I started I literally started with filing the claims folders. He then asked me to handle claims under $1,000 then $5,000 and now I handle any claim we have. Some are as high as $50,000 and require a considerable amount of time and effort when coordinating with insurance adjusters, government inspectors, factoring companies, our company, and salvage companies. I also helped create a spreadsheet tool that tracks the progress of cargo claims. This tool enables the company to keep track of the progress of a claim, thus eliminating costs of employees verifying completed steps in the claim process.

An example of tackling inefficiency in the credit request process since my arrival seven months ago is that credit requests now only take an hour instead of five. That is an 80% reduction in time spent approving credit! Once these stopgap measures were in place for claims and credit I was able to focus on other inefficiencies in the company.

At the beginning of my employment the company’s credit risk was about five hundred million dollars. That was the available credit extended to our customers to use (or abuse). My job is to reduce that risk. I analyzed our customer’s shipping needs, how often they ship, and the last time they shipped. I was able to adjust the amount of credit we extended to them and as a result of my efforts we have been able to reduce our credit risk by almost $470 million dollars! We’ve since safely extended another 10.7 million in credit to our customers.

Another fulfilling project for me was Dunn & Bradstreet analysis. I suggested using some university students to do statistical analysis of data we use when deciding on giving credit to a customer or not. This resulted in my supervisor thanking me for thinking outside of the box. That project is still a possibility as we study programming capabilities on our end, plotting of information, and statistical considerations.

My most significant career accomplishment to date though involved another initiative I took in automating the credit approval process for smaller credit amounts. This had me considering the complete automation of my position, resulting in complete elimination of human involvement. This effort is on hold till we hit a certain number of requests per year, which is currently about one half of the needed number in order to automate the process. Till then my position will still exist. My superiors, after reading my proposition said, “Well thank you Brock, for showing us how to eliminate your position.”