Tara Lane Email & Phone Number

Charlottesville, Va, Us

Charlottesville, Virginia, United States

As an Associate Production Manager, I was responsible for leading teams of 12-30+ direct reports in the Digital department of Custom Ink's in-house production facility in Charlottesville, VA. My main areas of focus were hiring and retaining top talent, individual development, employee engagement and recognition, process improvement, cross-functional communication, and driving performance.I was one of six members of the first in-house production hiring team, which was a cross-site initiative to hire those who would be successful in a production environment. We partnered with the recruiting team and met weekly to discuss best practices and weekly highlights. This team was ramping up and had already made a positive impact when the decision was made to slow hiring until after the new year.I held monthly 1:1 meetings with all of my team members to provide and solicit feedback about the individuals and the overall team. I fostered a growth environment where team members knew they could come to me with questions and I would follow up if I didn't have the answer immediately. I helped plan for and led the team through the 2023 "busy season," which was Thanksgiving - Christmas. My peer and I worked out a staffing plan for each week to ensure weekly production capacity was exceeded, and I implemented employee recognition events to keep the team productive, engaged, and appreciated throughout weeks of scheduled overtime, leading to a record-breaking busy season.On a weekly basis, I created a staffing plan for ~50 team members and checked in daily with productivity and quality metrics. As a department, we regularly achieved 125% - 140% productivity with quality averaging under a 3% external error rate. I identified areas for improvement and implemented several processes, including a productivity tracker in multiple roles as well as an internal review process that resulted in a 50% decrease in spoilage. I communicated across teams to ensure orders would deliver correctly.

Flower Mound, Texas, United States

This role allowed me to lend support in a recruiting role specific to production in order to build a strong candidate pipeline and grow our internal teams. I was responsible for full-cycle recruiting from resume review to offer utilizing Workday and Jobvite. Initially I was working on site in this role but I later transitioned to working remotely.I was responsible for 4 evergreen reqs, one of which actually had to be temporarily closed due to the staff being full. I averaged 20-30 phone screens per week and 3-6 hires/week. I grew the staff at one site by 11% in 2 months, maintaining an 85% retention rate. The reqs were spread across 3 separate sites, each in a different time zone. I coordinated schedules with candidates and hiring managers to bring candidates in for interviews at each site. I met on a bi-weekly basis with the site leaders and recruiting leadership to assess hiring needs and solicit feedback. I created a tracker to ensure that each of my hires was moving along in the process and all steps were completed before their start date. I also retained data on how they were doing in the role and followed up with site leaders about attrition. When we brought on an RPO recruiter to assist with hiring at Custom Ink, I supported him with learning our process and regularly answered any questions he had.

Flower Mound, Texas, United States

Shortly after being hired at Custom Ink I began training others and was soon promoted to Production Supervisor. In this role, I was primarily responsible for team recognition, process improvement, order expediting, team development, and interviewing and hiring new team members. I trained 40+ new and existing team members in a variety of roles throughout the production facility, including teaching new trainers how to train. I raised my hand and asked to participate in the internal as well as external hiring process and helped create interview guides for internal interviews. I truly enjoyed getting to help shape the face of the production team, hiring and promoting over 25 team members. I spent time on and off the floor coaching others. I worked with 20 team members to develop their skill sets on and off the floor, helping each of them to earn an internal promotion within 6 months.I regularly worked with Tableau, SAP, and spreadsheets in Excel and Google Sheets to analyze data and produce daily productivity reports, as well as constantly tracking priority orders. I collaborated with a small team of my peers and leaders to create an entirely new end-to-end internal workflow system that reduced overall headcount by 1. I then presented this new system to my shift and helped implement it across shifts, regularly asking for feedback on the overall process. I created multiple different recognition programs, including a peak season event in which team members could award raffle tickets to their peers when they caught them doing a great job. This event not only allowed the team to feel appreciated, it also encouraged everyone to see the best parts of each other. I created 14 detailed sets of Standard Operating Procedures, acting as a subject matter expert for some areas and consulting with peers for others.

Denton, Tx

In this role, I was responsible for leading a team of ~25 direct reports. This included hiring, scheduling, training, coaching, and working alongside them. Here I helped set up the point of sale system they are still using today, and then I implemented it with my whole team, ensuring each team member was fully trained on it. I was also responsible for all cash handing, including reconciling daily cash deposits, balancing the cash register after each shift, calculating tip out totals for team members, and maintaining appropriate levels of petty cash and change. My team did an amazing job keeping customer satisfaction high and we averaged a score of 4.5 on Yelp during my time there.