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.

Today I Attended three different meetings. The first was a meeting called, "The 9" which is held at 9am every tuesday and friday. In The 9, the heads of each separate division of the company come together and talk about what their plans are for the week. Also what needs to happen to stay up with their deadlines. The people who attend this meeting are the heads of shipping, recieving, labeling, marketing, sales, the junior president, the COO, and the CEO. Today they talked about needing the shipping department to send out forty pallets of product to petsmart. Also, receiving shippments from Iraq and Iran in mid July, and the new products that are coming in. They were receiving new products such as softgels to send to Rite Aid and Discount DrugMart (DDM). Due to the new product being made, they needed to contact label artist to draw new labels so the product could be allowcated to the companies. An important idea I learned in The 9 was to go out to the stores and check on products, both your own and your competitors. This is because it is very important to know where your product is located on the shelf, it can affect the way it is being sold. Also, to make sure your product is not clumping while sitting on the shelves. Companies need to check on the competitors product to make sure they are staying competitive, in the sense of both price and quantity.

The other two meetings I attended were the accounting meeting and a meeting with a computer information technology company. In the accounting meeting I learned that when you sell to companies, a lot of the time they will not pay in full and will come up wirth reasons why they have deducted from the products value. When this happens the company needs to decide what to do about the money being lost, either to write it off, or to defend their product and try to get the full payment. The other meeting with the I.T company was very interesting. The CFO, Jim Jumpeter, told me when meeting with businesses you may sign with, a lot has to do with your emotional and gut feeling torwards them because if you sign a deal, you are starting a relationship with the company for the next 3-5 years. Make sure you feel confortable with that business.

Hours: 6am-3pm

Today, I meant the CEO and President of the company, Steve Snyder. There is no wonder why this man is so successful, and running a $60 million company. From the minute I meant him I could tell he was special. He is very down to earth and an unbelievalbe people person. I could not believe how welcome he made me feel at the company, especially for me to just be an intern. He is a very busy man, and I have talked to many employees, no one has had a single bad comment to say about him. He is well respected by his staff. I can already tell how hard of a worker he is, and he seems to know lierally everything about the company and what is happening on a day to day basis.
He has decided that I will spend each day of the week in a different department of the company.
Monday- Accounting
Tuesday- Opporations/Quality
Wednesday- Purchasing
Thursday- Sales and marketing
Friday- Attending Meetings and Projects

My Hours are: Monday-Thursday 6am-5pm
                      Friday- 6am-3pm

Mr.Snyder told me that one of the main things to know about running a business is that there is a delicate balance between being too far ahead and too far behind.

Hours: 6am-5pm

Second dat of work at 21st Century Healthcare. During the second day I meant with the master scheduler, John Horsefield. He took me on a more in depth tour of the company. He showed me how each individual part worked and what that entailed. I also worked a little more with Mr. Jumpeter. He told me that when dealing with transactions of any kind. make sure that they have to go through more than one person before they can be finished. For example, I watched and help a $37,000 transaction go through from our company to a company in Yemen. For this to happen, the CFO had to initiate the transaction. The COO, Scott Jenkins, had to look it over and send it to the CEO, Steve Snyder, who would then finalize the transaction and send it to Yemen. To take security measures even farther-- for the CFO to even start the process he had to use a token code number that changes every thirty seconds, as the password. By taking these types of measures, when making a wire transfer, ensures that employees are not stealing money from the company.


Hours: 6am-5pm

During my first day at the company I meant and spent a lot of time with the CFO. His name is Jim Jumpeter. His first question to me was about who I was, and how I came to be sitting where I am today. We talked for a little while about each other and then the rest of the day was a breif tour around the company. He told me three very inportant things to remember. First, the CFO protects the company assets, so he needs to be someone trustworthy. Second, when starting a new business, dont reinvent the wheel. Finally, he said to always inspect dont expect. 

Hours: 6am-5pm