Our bees are what makes scoutbee a special and vibrant company. While having different backgrounds and personalities, every colleague has a passion for their field of work and our collective mission. This month, we talk to Han-Chun Hsu, our Team Lead Supplier Onboarding at scoutbee.

What does a typical day at scoutbee involve for you?

Talking about my typical day, it’s important to mention how my typical week is usually kicked off. First thing I do on Monday morning is to meet the team in Berlin and Würzburg, followed by the weekly meeting with other Ops leads. We exchange info on how our weekend went, and in the meantime, we all bring a lot of energy to the team. My typical day involves mostly internal alignment on progress updates, capacity planning and allocation, bringing the user feedback and user stories to the product team. 

As one of the youngest teams in the company, there are some days when I am packed with 1-on-1s with the teammates to closely align with everyone’s expectation at work, e.g. on career development opportunities in the company, and to brainstorm on process enhancement: Cheerleading when cases need recalibration, celebrating when a case has a high feedback rate, and flagging for help when things require it: this is all part of my daily routine. In recent months, quite some interviews fill my day to get to know new faces who will potentially join the team.

What challenges do you face and how do you deal with these?

To serve and expand our supplier networks around the globe, the supplier onboarding team consists of global team members with 15 nationalities from more than 5 time zones. I have not pictured such hyper growth when I first joined scoutbee as a supplier onboarding specialist and not to mention that I will constantly coordinate with such a diverse team. 

I’ve observed in the past year at scoutbee that the key elements for a high performing team are two things: Be data-driven and be transparent. Thanks to the early adoption of Salesforce to centralize all supplier information and onboarding activities, we are able to review the onboarding efforts and outcomes in a much more systematic way. By creating a shared space and open feedback channel to constantly communicate the key metrics within the team, we foster not only knowledge exchange but also shared responsibilities.
Another big challenge for the whole supplier onboarding team is that not every industry is ready for digital transformation. Sometimes it requires double or even triple the amount of onboarding effort to achieve the same outcome. While our customers are from all industries, we are trying all efforts to benchmark the supplier response rate and set the baseline for onboarding efforts. 

“Constant review and correction wherever there’s new market trends or knowledge transfer keeps us on the right track.”

What makes working at scoutbee special for you?

Being part of the most diverse and youngest team and growing with the company from the team size of 4 people to 28 has been a special journey to me. Every few months, there’s a new challenge awaiting me. The learning curve has been steep as I try to reset myself to zero for every new task. To catch up with the up-scaling, we transformed from complete manual data-entry into complete automation and integration between the soft phone, the CRM tools and the email system. The constant growth opportunities as well as the timely support and training from the leadership team are really appreciated. 

What are you and your team looking forward to accomplishing at scoutbee? 

To sustain the expansion of supplier networks across industries, we are looking forward to achieving world’s major language coverage in the local regions with instant supplier support without delay. We are now in the trial phase of localization by adopting a multi-channel onboarding process to incorporate messaging applications such as Whatsapp and WeCom into the established call and emailing system in the B2B environment.

“Along with such growth, we are also excited to constantly enlarge and enrich our supplier knowledge base with industrial, national and even cultural observations.”

What’s the best or most enjoyable part of the work your team does? 

The supplier onboarding team members find it very rewarding to see the excitement from the supplier when we present the business opportunities right in front of them, especially those smaller size and ‘unknown’ companies. Although most of the time we face more questions than excitement, we aim to motivate them to join the digital transformation and share the success with us. Being the first and direct contact with the global suppliers, we receive the most direct feedback from the supplier users. This feedback all becomes a valuable asset for the product team to develop new features or foster innovation. We can also acquire first hand industry information and market trends, which connect us with the global pulsations and make work much more fun.

Han-Chun joined scoutbee in 2019. She came to Germany in 2013 to study in Deggendorf. After she finished her Masters in Berlin in 2015, she started to work for e-commerce companies in the Berlin startup community. She is an expert in online platforms and the use of Big Data.
Would you like to join Han-Chun´s team or any other team in our hive? Please check out our “Open Roles” here.