Month 1 – August 2012

It’s been a month since I started with Hajoca at the Lansdale, PA location. So far, I’ve been learning a lot of things, and everything is going very well. I’m now certified to operate the forklift, and I’ve pretty much gotten the hang of picking orders, packing shipments for UPS, and receiving freight for purchases that we made.

Our profit center (a.k.a. PC or branch) has 17 employees, and everyone has been very helpful. I am the 18th person working at the Lansdale profit center. I will be working here for a year; after my first year, I will move to a different PC for my second phase of the management development program.

I started out spending three days out doing deliveries with each of our drivers. This was a good experience because I had plenty of time to talk to each one of them and their perspective on the company, our business, and work/life balance. It was also important for me to physically go to our customers’ job sites and actually see who we were selling to.

The main challenge the first few days was to learn the names of products and the warehouse layout. Fortunately, I’m getting pretty familiar with our main commodity items and where they are located.

My mentor, Jeff, is the manager of this PC. The people here respect him and as far as I can tell, he does a good job as a manager and leader. I spend most of the day working in the warehouse, but Jeff gives me about an hour a day to do my MDP office work (e.g. ProductPro coursework and exams, studying SPIs). By and large, I’m happy with my decision to work at Hajoca and looking forward to doing a whole lot more in the future!