What the Nissan Qashqai Launch Taught Me About Business & Innovation
With summer jobs on the horizon, professionals recall the first jobs that launched their careers. Read more, then write your own #CareerLaunch post.
In the current competitive environment of graduate recruitment, any possible way to give yourself a heads start is worth considering. How my #CareerLaunch occurred was in opting to take a year out of my degree to take up an internship with Nissan at the Washington Manufacturing Plant. Albeit with responsibility for their Supply Chain Management Systems.
I recall feeling ecstatic that I had landed this opportunity to give my career a boost before it had even started. Yet given a lack of experience, had no real clue as to what may be asked of me. I was allocated my desk, a PC, introduced to my team and my fellow interns and was given a briefing by the departing intern.
Much of the expected tasks followed… basically nothing too strenuous but enough to challenge an enthusiastic student. Activities such as ownership of an East Asia Vehicle Transportation Manifesto, Senior Level Reporting, Vehicle Order Programing, Database Restructuring. The norm for a Computer Science major.
Yet there was an event on the horizon which looking back, became a key part of my career.
An Education in Scalability
The Qashqai was due to launch towards the back-end of 2006. A number of months after I joined Nissan. The Qashqai was been launched out of the Washington plant. Naturally, it was all-hands-on-deck as we all prepared for launch. Re-coding a large number of programmes, ensuring adequate database structures, pre-populating data fields to support sales, managing workflows for ordering systems, ensuring appropriate management reports & the works. Typical activities to cater for a new product launch. One which was expected to be a hit.
The Qashqai was launched to a media fanfare, with many hailing the vehicle for the flexibility it gave to our customers. A first of its kind in the compact crossover space. A family vehicle yet one with enough gravitas to make it look cool and be a comfortable drive. Orders were unprecedented. Demand far exceeded supply with mass back-logs arising within the manufacturing arm of the plant. When walking around the plant the demand was clear. The real education arose a couple of weeks after launch.
Reports were coming through of tens of thousands of orders per day in the initial release period. One of the teams ‘on-hold’ activities was to restructure the database which detailed every single order which came through the Washington Plant. The databases had not ever handled such a scale of demand in the plant. Overnight batch jobs had previously ran smoothly which gave the department an opportunity to cleanse the database at the appropriate time. Yet given the hit of the Qashqai, the order log was filling at a rapid rate. The vast success of the Qashqai was extended this overnight batch job. The ordering systems were slowing. Often the overnight batch job ran into the next morning deeming the ordering system un-useable for a short-time. Not ideal when customers are waiting.
Needless to say, immediate action was needed. I was drafted into a subset of the Supply Chain team with the priority of restructuring the database with a much needed daily archival process. After inputting interim measures to resolve the immediate pains, work began on a long-term solution. After a week of testing options and having a relative free-reign on solving the problem, a solution was implemented reducing the processing time from what had become over 12 hours to a mere 2 hours.
The key lesson learned for me was to be flexible and to be supportive of those around me. After all, we cannot cover every possibility yet we can work as a team to resolve the outcomes
Why It Matters Today
I regularly refer back to these experiences with a number of key lessons which helped to launch my career:
- Foresight is a wonderful thing yet however we may expect aspects of our work or life to turn out, there will always be something that comes along to make it interesting
- That interesting challenge may cause us immediate stress yet once over it, we will learn from it and *hopefully* account for it next time
- You can never truly predict the success of anything in the World. The best way to prepare is to focus on the scalable rather than risk limiting your options
More posts on this topic:
- “What Designing a Shampoo Bottle Taught Me About Business” — Meg Whitman
- “Here’s the Scoop: Why My First Job Mattered” — President Barack Obama
- “Delivering Papers and Working as a Security Guard Taught Me How to Hustle” — Maynard Webb, Chairman, Yahoo!; Former COO, eBay
- “Remember Your First Job?” — Tom Perez, Secretary of Labor at U.S. Department of Labor
- “My First Job Lasted One Summer — But It Changed the Way I See the World” — Katie Couric, Yahoo Global News Anchor
- “Employers: Young Workers Are Your Diamonds in the Rough” — Maria Contreras-Sweet, Administrator of US Small Business Administration
About Stephen
Stephen Baines is a Senior Management Consultant and MBA currently working for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and pursuing a number of external entrepreneurial ventures. The views within this post are explicitly those of Stephen and have no representation of any organisation Stephen represents. If you wish to contact Stephen, please contact him via LinkedIn or his Twitter handle (@baines1986).
Read more about Stephen at Stephen’s personal website
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#CareerDevelopment #Mentoring #CareerLaunch
