James Snyder

What He Does

James has two primary responsibilities. One is to lead the development of individual business cases that improve Coca-Cola’s supply chain. This can include investment in new package capabilities, improving current operations, and building new operations. It involves extensive modeling of the supply chain, financial analysis, and work within Excel. His other primary responsibility is to assist in developing the long-term (5-10 year) network plan for optimal production and distribution of Coca-Cola beverages. This requires a detailed knowledge of Coca-Cola’s supply chain modeling software and project management skills.

Necessary Job Skills

James’ job involves significant amounts of cost, production, and shipment data. A detailed understanding of data relationships is necessary to execute projects. He also utilizes a linear programming/multi-integer programming tool to run optimization models of the supply chain. And since most of the financial analysis is performed using Excel, having a full understanding of Excel capabilities is very important.

Learn about financial principles. I learned a ton about accounting and financials on the fly when I started working at coca-cola. I could have benefited a lot from having more background in this.

Pros and Cons Of His Job

The best part of James’ job is using data and analytics to develop solutions to real-world supply chain opportunities and the most rewarding part is implementing projects that lead to improvements in Coca-Cola’s cost, service, and quality of their beverages. Working on projects that involve new production capabilities is particularly rewarding once you see a new package being produced in a facility that you worked with. The least favorite aspect for James is the complexity! Inevitably there are multitudes of scenarios to be assessed for a single project and it is often difficult to manage multiple complex scenarios.

I was surprised by the amount of reliance people put on me early on in my career. As a new supply chain analyst I began working on real impact projects very early on, which was exciting and also quite intimidating.

Work/Life Balance

Coca-Cola puts a lot of value in work/life balance and treats employees very well.

Career Path

James joined Coca-Cola at an entry level position as a Supply Chain Analyst and over the last four years he has been promoted twice within the same team (Supply Chain Analyst, Senior Supply Chain Analyst, Supply Chain Consultant). They interact with multiple parts of the business, providing ample opportunity to learn and discover interests. James and his manager had a plan for James to grow and learn within his team, which is a great place within Coca-Cola to start a career and grow, both internally and externally within Coca-Cola.

Career Expectations and Advice

Being good at managing multiple projects with many different stakeholders is a real and under-appreciated skill.

Work hard to develop project management skills.

Salary

Entry Level $55–65K. Consultant $75–85K