-: My name's Derrick Roy, and I'm a consultant
for a supply chain logistics company.
Supply chain is the complex way organizations move things
from point A to point B.
It's the behind-the-scenes operation
behind every major retailer, every piece of material
used in construction, it's basically the infrastructure
that supports the way we move things in the United States.
So immediately after graduating from the MBA program in 2013
I started with the company
J.B. Hunt Transport in operations.
And so just an hour away of the campus
in Danbury, Connecticut, I managed a team of truck drivers
that were delivering groceries 24/7 into the grocery stores
outside New York City Metro.
About a year into that role,
was promoted into the account manager position.
And then ultimately moved into
organizational development consulting internally.
And so what that meant was I facilitated conversations
and managed projects across the country,
all the way from defining the problem, to measuring it,
analyzing it, improving upon the implementation
or the pilot, and then controlling for it after the fact,
a model that I learned here at Western Connecticut State.
In my current role,
I'm an external organizational development consultant,
which means I do something similar in the sense
that I facilitate a conversation around how to solve
large problems within supply chain, except now I'm doing it
outside the company with our future customers,
as part of a sales process, or existing customers as needed.
I worked on a project recently where the organization
was experiencing some problems in profitability,
particularly in the labor side of the equation.
Said otherwise, the specifics yielded unfavorable results
for the organization's bottom line.
And so they brought in a small group of folks
that I was honored to lead,
and we started with simply analyzing the data.
We wanted to better understand where the pain points were,
what was causing the organization some pain.
And so we analyzed multiple reports.
We interviewed key stake-holders, and presented our findings
in a current analysis, if you will,
that included some historical context to the folks
that had nominated this team.
And so based on how that conversation went,
we identified next the series of steps we might take
in order to test or implement a pilot program
that might solve some of those challenges.