Who got that job?

By STEVE HART

Where you one of the people who applied for this job and wondered who got it?


National operations manager, Deltarg Distribution Systems, Auckland.

Deltarg is one of the country's largest distributors of promotional mailings and leaflets. With more than 40 clients, including many large chains such as supermarkets, the company solves the logistical issues of taking delivery of bulk leaflets from printing houses and getting them into people's mail boxes nationwide.

Australian Scott Parsons was attracted to the role because it matched the type of work he carried out at Qantas as a production engineer in one of the airline's parts warehouses.

"I was looking to get back into an operational type role in a warehouse and logistics environment after a period of working in sales. In this new role I am helping many of the same clients I worked with while in sales.

"At Qantas I looked after the production side of workshops for aircraft maintenance and oversaw a staff of about 300. I worked in component maintenance which covered everything from toilet pumps to avionic equipment and supplying parts for ground support vehicles.

"Deltarg has ISO [a European quality control standard] accreditation and so there are many set procedures. While it is a young company - about 10 years old - it has expanded rapidly. I see my job initially to look at the systems in place and help make things work more efficiently."

The company has a new warehouse and Parsons says his experience with Qantas will help him to streamline the operation and ensure valuable space is not wasted. A lot of his work will also involve improving communication between staff and between staff and clients.

"There is room to change things so there is a smoother flow of information across the company. The first thing I did was let my team know that our sales team need to be treated as clients. If our client is happy then their clients - organisations such as Progressive Enterprises - will be happy."

Parsons has an Industrial Engineering (Social) diploma which covers time management. One of the things it has trained him to do is to question existing processes and to encourage people to ask: 'Why are we doing this, and what is the goal?'."

Deltarg