A day in the life of…Neil Armstrong, Logistics Co-ordinator

As a Logistics Co-ordinator for TSG, my day can be really varied. I mostly work from our National Distribution Centre, which is where we keep all of the hardware that we supply to customers and colleagues alike. Here is what a typical day can look like for me:

9:00am
I’m in the warehouse with a cup of tea in hand. My first job of the day is to check the shared logistics email inbox for collection requests and scheduled shipping plans for upcoming customer projects; this helps me plan out some of my workload for the day. I work closely with our Project Coordinators to ensure we meet our agreed ETAs.

9:30am
customer has had problems with their laptop and an engineer has sent it in for repair. I check Autotask – the system we use to manage our IT service desk – to find the ticket it relates to and book the ticket to our Technical Repair Centre, where our Technical Repair Engineers will assess and fix if the laptop if possible. Upon completion, I package the laptop back up ready to be shipped back to our customer.

10:00am
It’s time to look at stocking up our field engineers’ kit. We ensure each of our engineers have a minimum stock in their car boot so they can deal with a number of different customer requests when they’re out on the road. We can run a report that tells us what each engineer needs re-stocked, and we can allocate based on the items they use the most. This allows them to respond to customer requirements faster and ensures they’ve got everything they need for site visits – especially if they do multiple visits a day, which is often the case.

I then check our remaining stock levels are checked to ensure all fast moving stock items are available for the next replenishment requests.

11:00am
We’ve had some requests in from customers for parts or new hardware. It’s my job to take care of these requests, allocating existing resources where necessary and passing to support purchasing to order new parts in if we need them. There’s a few new parts to order, so I take the opportunity to include these in my stock replenish – we need to keep stock levels in the warehouse adequate. This includes items like laptops, desktop PCs and hard drives which we can either sell or loan to customers. This means I’m able to get two things done at once.

12pm
Lunchtime!

1pm
Next up, I look at the specific requests from our field engineers. Whilst it’s useful to keep their boots stocked with the hardware they’ll use regularly, we can’t fit everything in! Our engineers will request specialist items or hardware that they don’t require as much. It can be as simple as cables or replacement parts, so we order them in.

1:30pm
It’s time to deal with our sales order processing. Firstly, I receive all of the SOPs that have come into the warehouse – these are from various projects to provide kit for our customers. I book all items in and allocate them a space in the warehouse until they’re required. Then I deal with the SOPs that need to go out. These orders come through to my team, and it’s our job to divide up the kit between the orders, organise them by project, book the kit and ship it out.

2pm
We sometimes get internal IT requests from colleagues. This is often equipment for new starters, which can include full machinery. It can also be replacement parts like keyboards or a mouse, or a new phone if a colleague’s has broken (or if they’ve broken it…) so once again I get all of this equipment ready to ship to our offices.

2.30pm
Throughout the week I take a look at our WEEE responsibility – this is the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This law means that companies who sell electronic equipment like us must dispose of electrical waste securely. We manage the levels of waste and arrange collections both from our Team Valley office and nearby customers. This is to reduce unnecessary waste and contamination of the environment.

3pm
As part of a scheduled stock check rota, I will be allocated a set of shelves to run reports on and check all parts are present and correct. I verify results and submit these to my Team Leader to collate in a stock profile for accuracy at end of month/year reports.

4pm
Throughout the day, the support requests received by our call desk have been allocated to engineers and those requiring parts are waiting for us in our shipping queue. I process these one by one, picking the correct part from our stock and shipping with the designated courier – we use three different couriers to keep things running smoothly. We then update the tickets to notify engineers and customers of expected parcels.

5.25pm
At the end of the day, I do one final sweep to ensure all parcels are with the correct courier and have been scanned and placed onto the correct vans.

5:35pm
Home time!

Hopefully this has given you an insight into how some of TSG’s key business processes are carried out, and how many elements are involved in keeping our customers satisfied. You can find out more about our personalised customer services in the videos below – see if you can spot me…