Meet Hannah from Buying Admin
What is a typical day like for you?
The good thing about Lidl is no day is the same, but we do a variety of promotional work. Mostly we plan the promotions for seasonal and listed items and make sure that everything goes ahead. We may deal with data entry or preparing information for contracts. We also contact countries to make sure they have all the information they need for a promotion to go ahead. We deal with delivery issues too, for example if a supplier is stuck at the border, or stuck at a dock, or doesn't have the necessary paperwork.
Is there anything you’re particularly proud of?
Yes, you get some quite big challenges here. The main thing is the time constraint - promotions are planned 20 to 30 weeks ahead but you do have to make sure that you react quickly to changes. For us, Christmas is pretty much finished off months in advance and we’ll start working on the following Spring Week promotion in Autumn for the following year. What I’m really pleased about is I’ve made a few internal changes. One was creating a catalogue of all our supplier and warehouse contact details. It was my pet project and it’s made life a lot easier for everybody else as they can find all our suppliers’ details in one place and it makes things a lot quicker for them. One other thing I’m proud of is stopping a couple of pallet orders that, if I hadn't caught them, would have had to be destroyed wasting a lot of money. I was quite pleased with that.
What qualities would someone need to join your team?
I think they’d need to be quite patient because sometimes we have to wait for information and there can be delivery issues, so you need to be able to keep a good head sometimes. You also need to be quite organised. We juggle a lot of balls as there may be a few things on the go at the same time. And friendliness really helps - if you're quite a friendly, positive person that helps when you're speaking to suppliers or other departments. It really makes a big difference if you've got that kind of approachable nature.
What attracted you to Lidl and what makes you stay?
A big selling point for me was the variety of the work. As I said, no day is the same, which is fantastic. Lidl itself is also a big selling point. Their commitment to sustainability is something that really drew me into joining them – for example the amount of British products they use and also their commitment to reduce plastic. They’ve got a scheme where, instead of having plastic bags, there are these kind of mesh bags to put your vegetables in it. We were really pleased when they did that. The other thing is also our charity work. We have a partnership with the NSPCC and since I’ve been here I’ve been part of more charity events than you could possibly imagine. We've had book sales, bake sales, somebody climbing Kilimanjaro, another person did the Peak District Challenge - it’s fantastic.
The training is fantastic. I’ve had three months of intensive training, both external and on-the-job. The Branding and Packaging training I received was invaluable for some of the work we do - submitting artwork requests for example.
As part of your training, you also get to go into other departments, so you really get a better idea of Lidl overall, which is great. It's really good to see how other departments work and you get to understand their perspective on things, which helps us to foresee any questions they may have for our team. You end up thinking “Okay, I know that they'll end up asking this question. We might as well give them the information now to try and avoid any mistakes or problems in the future."
Finally, what four words would you use to describe Lidl?
Dynamic. Passionate. Flexible. Inspirational.