Worked on returns for Petsmart. $150,000 worth of the product they returned was inflatable dog collars that they wanted repackaged from oyster-shell casings to cardboard casings. I did returns from 6-23-12 to 7-10-12. Now all of the Petsmarts returns are finished and I have also done returns for companies such as ANDA and Cardinal Health. I have done 51 pallets worth of product over the last couple weeks. I will start a new project within the week. 

Steve Snyder, the CEO of the company has alsways had a policy with his customers, that if they buy a product from him and it does not sell as they would have liked, he will buy his own product back from them. Today 21st Century recieved a notification that Petsmart was returning $250,000 worth of product. Some of it because it expired and did not sell, but most of it, just to be repackaged into different boxes and sent back to their company. So my job is to process all of the procucts individually to make sure they are sending back everything they say they are. That way we can reimburse the company for the correct amount. There are many steps in doing returns that have to be followed. First, I have to separate each individual product. Then, separate each product into their specific lot number on the bottle. Then, finally, log each individual product and separate lot number into the computer. This will tell us if they have sent back rthe correct number of products or not. When putting the products into the computer, I have to write down the procuct name, the UPC number, the specific lot number, the expiration date and the amount of that lot number in the return. This is done for every product. Petsmart returned 51 pallets worth of product.

Today I attended The 9 and the accounting meeting. I was informed in The 9 that we spend $185,000 on a Petsmart commercial that was supposed to be airing within the next week. I also found out in the accounting meeting that we held the customer that only paid $90,000 worth of their product to the original agreement. They we paying the other 10 thousand on Monday.

First thing in the morning, the COO asked me to run him over to the dealership to pick up his car. Later I worked with sales and marketing on what is call the planagram room. This is a room full of samples of every product we make and sell. When a costomer makes and order, we have a four foot by seven shelf display that is used to put up samples of every product they ordered. That way, if they come to the company to look at the labels and bottles, we have them all laid out in alphabetical order for them to see. My job today is to re-organize the planagram room and all the shelves with the different orders. This means I am handed an order sheet and have to go through and clear off all the shelves before I can begin. I look at all the samples and throw out all that are expired. Then, I take the order sheet and put three to six samples of each individual product that is being ordered on the shelf. By the time I am finished, I have put up 300 different products, at three to six a piece and it has taken me six hours of work. the work is not hard, but it is very time consuming.

Today I did not go into work because my uncle Paul passed away. I flew back to Ohio, and will not be back to work in Arizona until June 21, 2012.

Today I was back sitting in on meetings. In the morning I checked my Email and found out they were switching me to an online Timecard. Then I sat in on The 9, and the Accounting meeting. The 9 was relitively similar, everything seemed to be on track and going smoothly. I found out that a lot of orders come in and need to be shipped right at the end of the month so this meant that the end of every month is very busy. Each dividsion was trying to best prepare itself to be ready for the end of the month. During the accounting meeting, I was told that we shipped $100,000 worth of product to a customer, and they only paid $90,000 for the shippment. As I mentioned earlier, this meant that the company have to decide what caused the loss and how to react to it. Was it Goverment trade problems, damaged goods, or the company just trying to not honor their agreement? I also found out that our company does specialized label art for separate companies and states. For example, we are in the midst of making a Chicago Bears label for a customer in Chicago.

Today I was working with sales and marketing. For almost the entire day I made marketing kits. This is one of our promotional tactics to help customers know how to best promost the product. They are a guide of how to get the best reaction of the product by the consumer. This will ultimately allow more sales. The marketing kits contained a brochure, two different diagrams of how to set up, and information about each product that was bought.

Today I worked with the head of purchasing, Rose Ann. First she showed me how to track a purchasing order that was being shipped through Fedex. The delivery was due to arrive on June 13th, 2012. She also talked to me about accounts payable and accounts receivable, which is the record of debts and money owed to the company. Next I was checking on Process Pro to see how many vendors the company had for each product. when I found how many vendors we had, I would record each one and the last date we ordered product from them. I did this for over 150 different products.
Later that day I sat in on a meeting at C&M Plastics L.L.C, who specialize in coustom mold building and design. I went to the meeting with Rose Ann and Mr. Hammer, and the owner of C&M, Sandra Craven. In the past, 21st Century has ordered from C&M, but Sandra made too many bottles and stuck us with the cost. Needless to say we wanted to avoid that from happening a second time. The problem with Sandra was that she was a little desparate. She had bought a building too big for what she needed and the payments were causing a burden on her. We had to remind her multiple times that we were sorry, but we couldn't put in a bigger order just because she needed to pay her bills. She was afraid of having to short sell her business. This means to sell at a lower price than what it was bought for in the first place. She was already down to only having one employee on the machine during a shift and there seemed to be only four people working in the entire building.

Today I worked with Mr. Steve Hammer, he is the head of labeling and inventory control. I was learning about Purchase Orders (PO) and the steps involved in purchasing products and labels. First I learned how to use a program thcompany uses called Process Pro, and I crated a label pull. Labels are put in files bi-weekly, and are separated by sulppliers. Then I pulled the labels, only the ones that are being used for that particular order and I made sure the micro dates matched. Micro dates are the dates of the last month and year that the product was ordered. Next, you look at the minimum and the maximum to decide how much needs to be ordered. The min and max are decided by how much the company ordered the very first time they bought from 21st century. That is considered the minimum. The maximum is just the minimum, doubled. These numbers give you a range of how much product may need to be ordered. When you decide how much needs to be ordered, you determine the cost and send the purchasing order transation. An important step before ordering product is to wait for the PO to come in before ordering shippments nad specific numbers. During the day I looked up fifty diffetent codes to find labels, ran micro dates to make sure they matched, and sold to companies such as Petsmart, Dicount Drugmart, HyVee, Nurti-Vet, and Laura Lynn. I also happened to stumble apun a problem in the labeling system. Balance B was labeled under B-Complex and was not able to be found. Mr. Hammer and I went into the labeling room and found the mistake that he said he had been looking for for multiple months.

Today I sat in with Mr Jumpeter and Mike Reeves, our I.T employee and talked about the company we saw on friday. On friday we meant with I.T. Synergy. I recieved emails from Jim about IT synergy and the competitor company we also interviewed. In the interviews I learned that comp0anies should keep backup servers in different buildings in case of a fire, that way you dont lose all of your records and computer systems. This is especially important because the company runs off of email to stay in contact throughout the day. In the interviews 21st Century Healhcare asked to be able to try out the IT company for three to six months before signing a three year contract. IT synergy did not allow this but their competitor did. While sitting in the interview with IT synergy, I listened to questions being asked such as, do you do service reports to comfirm how the systems are doing, and how often do you do service reports. Also, what do your service report consist of? If something is wrong with the company do they call immediately or send an email? Finally, are they availible 24 hours of the day? When IT synergy answered these questions, we came to find that they do service reports, but a lot of the information it consisted of was not relavent to anyone who is not an IT specialist. Also, they are open 27 hours of the day but if they are called or come to fix a server after regular hours, their cost is doubled. The only really strong answer the company had was that they both called and send out an email if there is a problem with the server. While listening to the company answer questions, I came to realize that there is a fine line between enough and too much information. Keep answers simple and only bring up what is relevant to the company. If there is too much information, there is a tendancy to desensitize the material. We came to the conclusion that the competitor of IT synergy was the better choice.