Laura Nicholson

Supply Chain Scheduler and Planner

How long have you been at Port Otago?
Since October 2021.

What did you do before you came to Port Otago?
I finished school in Gore and started at Mataura Valley Milk as a casual labourer, labelling bags until I figured out what I wanted to do. I moved into admin and worked my way up to Warehouse Administrator. I was there two years.

Why Port Otago?
My family moved to Dunedin and I wanted to move up too.
I was the Warehouse Administrator at Port Otago’s Sawyers Bay depot and heard this job was coming up – as Supply Chain Scheduler and Planner at D Shed, where Fonterra product is devanned*, stored and packed. It’s a step up for me and good for my career.
* Unloading cargo from a container.

What does your role involve?
It’s about planning which products need to be packed into which containers for the day. There are multiple types of milk powder and anhydrous milk fat in varied packaging sizes. I produce a “pack plan” and the team works off that. We average 72 TEU* a day.
I’m constantly juggling, which I love. At any point in time, I’ll be listening out for the team on the radio asking me to close a delivery for a container they’ve packed. I’ll be queueing full containers into our yard and replacing them with empties, so the straddle driver and forklift operators can continue working. You need to always be planning ahead, so you’re queuing in the correct container type for the product/order.
* TEU = Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit

What are the steps of an empty container arriving, through to it leaving the yard?
The container transfers are done each night on second shift.
Each morning, the process starts with me creating my packing report from Fonterra’s system, which will tell me how many empty containers I need to request from the terminal for packing the next day.
I attend the S&OP (Shipping and Operations) 0930 meeting every day, which is with the Operations and Planning and Control teams. They tell me what their container supply is looking like and how many ‘moves’ (swapping out empties for fulls we’ve packed) they are able to do that night. I then create a list of release numbers (specifying the types of containers we need for the next day’s packing), send that through to the terminal team and they release those containers to us.
When I come into work the next morning, the empties are in the yard waiting to be packed. I queue them into the appropriate packing packing areas, and those instructions come up on the straddle driver’s screen and they move the container into position. From there, we pack it. We have two teams at a time packing containers – sometimes three.
When the container is packed, the team on the floor call the position and container number out to me on the radio. I close the delivery off and queue the container out. The straddle driver sees this on their screen and they move the full container back into our stack, ready for the terminal team to take it away.

What are your hours of work?
7am – 3.30pm, Monday to Friday. There is the occasional Saturday, if we are busy.

What skills and attributes do you need for your job?
You have to be very particular and there are many things you need to keep your eye on at all times. Lots of people are relying on you to keep them working.
At school, I was good at applied maths and with numbers in general. And, in this job, you’re working with many, many numbers. For example, delivery numbers, shipment numbers, sales order numbers, release numbers, container numbers, positions in our container stack. The list goes on!

What’s the best part of your job?
I love the container control and organisation of it all – queuing up the containers in and out of the yard. It’s the satisfaction of the process, from start to finish. I also love seeing when we’ve have achieved a high number of containers packed at the end of the day. The team is awesome to work with. I wouldn’t be able to do my job without them and vice versa.

What’s the worst part of your job?
I like getting out into the warehouse, and there’s not always time.

Do you have your eye on a particular job at Port?
I look at every job that comes up and I’m open-minded about the future. But I’m good at this job and really enjoy it for now.