David Taylor joined ProtectaPet in 2019 as a Warehouse Picker and Packer. Within just two years he has progressed to Inventory Manager, which involves managing the warehouse, stock levels and a team of three members of staff. His determination, commitment and hard work have set him apart as an outstanding member of the team with a keen commitment to his own personal development and the progression of the company.
Here are some highlights of the outstanding aptitudes he has exemplified over the past year...
International trade is at the heart of ProtectaPet’s growth plan because of the huge market opportunity. Cat owners are increasingly seeking ways to keep their cats safe from harm. This is an international trend as cat owners in Australia, New Zealand and the United States already keep their cats inside or in enclosures and chip them by law in some states. However, legislative change has brought serious challenges to keep the movement of goods fluid into and out of the EU over the past few months. Dave has taken a lead on developing all the operational processes around selecting the right INCOTERMS, choosing the right VAT rates, producing and storing compliant paperwork such as commercial invoices and selecting the appropriate commodity codes.
Dave never stands still and continually looks for ways to improve processes. Having completed the legislative changes for Brexit and the introduction of the One Stop Shop European VAT registration, Dave turned his attention leading on a direct API integration from our inventory software to the Rotterdam site so that orders can be despatched effortlessly without human handling. This will save approximately one hour of time per day and remove any room for data entry errors.
Dave is a keen environmentalist and his commitment to reducing use and replacing with eco-alternatives exemplifies his sound business ethics. As a result of Dave's hard work, ProtectaPet eliminated polystyrene packaging, with an estimated 28mᶟ of material prevented from going to landfill every year. Polymesh waste produced when tailoring the mesh is now processed in a bailing machine so that it can be recycled. This process prevents an estimated 200mᶟ of waste from going to landfill every year so the total annual reduction in plastic landfill waste is 228mᶟ.
Dave is keenly committed to his own personal development and through the pandemic he has undertaken online modules at Udemy Academy in order to learn advanced excel skills and industry benchmarks on stock KPIs. This enabled him to produce an inventory dashboard featuring key ratios and metrics for us to analyse our stock usage. In combination with better procedures in the warehouse, Dave has overseen a stock accuracy rating improvement from 8% variance to 2% variance. Continuing with his personal development, Dave is starting the Hartree Centre's course on supercomputing , data management and AI training in industry this autumn.
Most recently, Dave has managed the training of our new 'kickstarter', custom building training materials around the businesses requirements and the kickstarter's existing skills sets. As a result, Nathan is currently celebrating the attainment of his forklift driving licence.
