Senior Ocean Planning Associate

The opportunity:

Our Ocean Gateway Team is essential to supporting our existing and new Ocean business by executing shipments as efficiently and effectively as possible. As a Senior Ocean Planning Associate, you will work closely with carriers and partners, as well as internal stakeholders across Procurement, Allocation & Yield, Regional Ocean Management and Sales/Account Management to grow our business, deliver improved customer experience and streamline our processes. Your main responsibilities are related to ensuring a seamless operation of moving ocean shipments under our Flexport contracts.

Candidates have a passion for ocean freight, an ability to collaborate with parties across our organization and work in a dynamic environment balancing multiple priorities.

What you will do:

• Coordinate day-to-day shipment assignments through our Fulfillment Management Tool (FMT) and handling operations with internal and external stakeholders. Regular communication with local partners and carriers
• Manage our internal fulfillment management process on a daily basis to ensure we optimize our ocean allocations with our client demand.  
• Learn to use our machine learning (AI) based systems which govern many of our fulfillment processes.  Provide feedback to business, product and tech teams for future improvements. 
• Maintain and improve databases involving our ocean allocation, sailing schedules, internal/external stakeholders and demand data sources. 
• Execute pre-bookings, support/hypercare trial shipments and submit rollover list if necessary
• Conduct data analysis on utilization and forecasts vs allocation
• Manage and resolve exceptions and escalations through the operations process in a timely manner based on agreed SLA’s
• Build and develop local carrier relationships including coverage of carrier meetings, performance metrics and market intelligence collection (extraloader plans, omissions and blank sailings)
• Work with the Ocean Procurement and Allocation & Yield on allocation planning and escalation handling. Manage hard allocation and give feedback to Allocation & Yield on requirements.
• Prepare forecasts and request soft allocation to match surplus demand in order to secure space for our clients
• Optimize through net revenue steering and deadfreight performance management
• Monitor performance CRD to ETD, SO to CRD and other relevant metrics
• Work on continuous process improvements
• Additional projects and duties as assigned

You should have:

• BA/BS degree with 5-8  years of professional logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, projects or, programs experience (ocean freight knowledge is a plus)
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, organizational skills
• Hands-on, process oriented, structured thinking with strong problem solving capabilities
• Strategic vision and ground floor execution
• Ability to identify win-win commercial and operational opportunities
• Ability to create data-driven insights that inform decisions and process improvements
• Strong ability to build relationships globally, managing different stakeholders and influencing others
• Analytical skills and next-level attention to detail, while still maintaining a macro perspective
• Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it
• A "compliance first" attitude to keep our regulators happy and enthusiastic about Flexport since we operate in a heavily regulated industry.

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