Month 12 – July 2013

I feel like I say this every time, but the past month has been incredibly busy. Not only was it my final month of Phase I of my MDP training, I also had two multi-day trips scheduled off-site.

I’ll begin with my on-site training for the month. I still had multiple learning sections of the operations module that I had to complete. Some of the important points included Accounts Receivables/Payables (AR/AP), Payroll, Hiring, Credits & Rebills, General Ledger, and the Hajoca Manager’s Approval Suite. This felt like an overwhelming amount of material to cover in such a short time, but Jeff and I sat down and scheduled a game plan to get everything done. I finished the Payroll material with Sam, the AP work with Christie, and everything else with Jeff. It was a lot of information thrown at me all at once, but I took good notes and made sure to learn these important aspects of Hajoca’s business.

I also had much going on off-site. First, I drove to Ardmore in the beginning of the month to meet with Cindy from the Internal Audit department. I have an operations review scheduled for August, so Cindy met with me to go over all of the procedures that IA performs and looks for during an operations review. An operations review is an unannounced audit of one or more of Hajoca’s profit centers. Everything from financials to employee safety is evaluated, and the profit center is assigned a score at the end of the review.

During the third week of the month, I was flown down to Houston, TX to attend a Solar Eclipse training session. “Solar” is the new GUI version of our Eclipse computer system. The plan is for me to become a confident user of the Solar system so that in November I can teach and train other employees how to use Solar effectively. I had already begun using Solar on my own, but I definitely learned a whole lot of useful features I did not know even existed during the class. Solar seems to be a very powerful piece of software, and I am very excited to unlock its full potential.

Last but not least, I drove up to Nashua, NH from the 25th through the 27th to help out with a new acquisition! Hajoca recently acquired Peabody Supply, located in New England. I volunteered to help out with counting inventory at the Nashua location. I worked with Andy from Internal Audit as well as Lee (another PC manager) and Bernie (a purchasing agent). Everyone worked hard and did a great job ensuring timely completion of the assignment. We even had time to enjoy a leisurely Saturday in sunny Boston 🙂

Starting on August 5th, I am going to be moving locations and starting my inside sales module at Weinstein Supply in Philadelphia. I did help them out with their annual inventory back in May, so I did at least have the chance to meet everyone then. A little anxious, but very excited about this move. Full update coming next month!