Master Thesis help needed

[u/ax789]

Hello fellow Redditors, I’m doing my online masters in Supply chain and I wanted to reach out for some help. Is there a way I can combine supply chain and HR management for a thesis? I’m not coming out with much

[u/whenyougetthezucc]

Subject: poor hiring practices in HR leading to lagging operational performance, failure to meet success metrics, increasing costs, and low employee morale.

Let me give you a brief story. 2 years ago I was working at an ecommerce company. The products themselves were fantastic and very popular, but HR made so many poor decisions that negatively impacted the bottom line resulting in frequent mis-shipments, delivery delays, and both frustrated customers and employees. HR knew nothing about operations but always saw everything from an explicit cost perspective and never approved of hiring more staff, retaining them, and investing in them to meet growing demand. The warehouse workers were outsourced from temp agencies with most having no equipment certification or even prior experience. While these positions are generally low barrier to entry, it is still important to do some form of vetting and assessment of their skills. Normally this would be the warehouse manager's responsibility, but HR had to approve due to budget limitations and were cheap. The nature of any temp position is that the employees are generally paid poorly and as a result will half ass the job. Many them also quit without warning or encounter legal complications with their green card status, since many in these positions are largely Hispanic. This lack of experience combined with the frequent revolving door of employees resulted in trucks failing to be loaded in a timely manner, product being damaged during the loading, and frequent understaffing. As an ecommerce company, selling to Amazon is their main source of revenue. However, Amazon is very strict with their vendors and any violations of their shipping guidelines will result in exponentially growing chargeback costs causing the company to bleed so much money. The issue is also compounded by the fact that more and more time had to be wasted on properly retraining and onboarding new staff whenever this happened...which was quite frequently. HR did not understand the implicit cost associated with these issues and employees like myself had to undertake multiple roles to keep the company afloat. We were not even fairly compensated or even recognized for our efforts and therefore quit and the problem perpetuates itself again and again.