From The Distribution Centre To The Quality Chapter — My Journey To Tech

From The Distribution Centre To The Quality Chapter — My Journey To Tech

Written by Dean Emery , SDET

Some people may look at my CV and find it lacking. It’s not varied enough, I have no experience working at different companies, no immersion into different work cultures and numerous ways of working. I’d argue otherwise. In my (pushing) 17 years at Dunelm (-Mill), it feels like I’ve moved to a new company multiple times, each time for the better. We are not the same company we were back in 2006 when I started as a teen!

Dunelm was never intended to be a career for me. I started out part-time after getting a leaflet through my door. I worked in our Stoke 1 warehouse as a DCO (Distribution Centre Operative) full time in the summer and part-time during term whilst at Uni. My main task was order picking stock (from paper) for our stores. I remember my first store pick, I think it was for Weston-Super-Mare, and it was as thick as the Bible, and in the 8 hours of picking I hadn’t even completed half of it!

Fast forward a few years and I’d completed my Degree and MA, but it was 2008–9 and the economy was in a bit of a shambles (some things never change eh?), and I wasn’t entirely sure on what career I wanted to pursue so I decided to go for a Team Leader role on the then small (but expanding) web team — which I didn’t get. Instead I got offered a role within the team, which I took, which did give me the opportunity to get into the office and get my hands dirty with SAP instead of furniture.

A few more years passed by, we had already expanded our Stoke 1 warehouse and now we had opened Stoke 2. I went for a role as a SAP Systems Superuser. I enjoyed fixing issues that would arise on a day-to-day basis, and to be honest I probably fixed some things I shouldn’t have had access to (but we don’t talk about that), but low and behold….. as before, I didn’t get the job!

6 months later and the role had been expanded, so I applied again, and luckily this time, I got it. This was easily the biggest step up I’d had to date, and the steepest learning curve by far. I didn’t really get the chance to practice fixing problems, problems occurred daily in Production which needed to be fixed ASAP as the inbound team couldn’t receive any goods into the warehouse, or the web team were unable to pick customer orders that needed to be dispatched in the next few hours, so it could be really full on. I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t think about going back to my previous, more comfortable role in those first few weeks, but sticking with it was one of the best decisions I have made.

Over the next 2 years, I worked across both SAP ECC and EWM, and eventually started to get involved in some User Acceptance Testing. We were taking our Web DCO’s off from their robotic voiced headsets to the new HHT’s and launching a new shipment console to make it easier for the team to group, pick, label, and dispatch customer orders. It was heavy going (no pun intended), but I loved the poking and prodding around, spotting issues and potential defects, giving demos, and testing the limits of the new system. This should be the part where I now say I moved across to tech and lived happily ever after right? Not quite…

A role came up as a Superuser on the DSV (now DTC) team, looking after anything tech for our suppliers. At the time they were split across two systems (BluJay and WASP) and different Carrier Management Systems (Route Genie & Metapack). I’d had no exposure at all to this side of the business and I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn a completely new area. I knew SAP well, but I didn’t know the other systems. I went for it, and for the first time in my life, I got the job first time! I was in this role for the shortest amount of time out of all but probably did more hours to make up for it! On any given day we could be dealing with P1 issues, suppliers not being able to print carrier labels, carriers not turning up, stock not being dispatched on time, incorrect stock feeds, and the one that sits high in my mind, going live with a new supplier with rolls of wallpaper at 1p each… which were very quickly snapped up, and equally snappily removed from site!

Around 10 months later a role came up that I couldn’t let pass. It was for a QA Engineer in the Supply Chain space. Looking at the job description I thought I had no chance, but I’d covered a lot of it inadvertently when I did UAT previously. Supply Chain was probably the role where I grew the most. We all achieved so much as a team, going live with 2 new iForce sites, GXO and Daventry, all whilst working from home. I completed my apprenticeship in Software Testing, completed Software Development Fundamentals to become an MTA, alongside self-learning creating Python scripts to mock iForce dispatches and creating a Postman collection to mock GXO dispatches.

I started my SDET role in March of this year, which has now easily become the steepest learning curve to date, but I have my list and goals of things I want to learn and achieve, and I’ll keep plugging away at them. The most important thing is enjoying the role you’re in, which I certainly do.

The path isn’t always as straight forward as people think:

So… what is the point of all of the above? I suppose the main takeaways are; you don’t need to come from a tech background to get into tech (a lot of people don’t), you don’t need to know everything inside out to start with to get a role (if you know it all then you’re over qualified, and you’ll be easily bored), there is no direct path to a role — I zig zagged all over the place, and probably most importantly, just keep trying, even if you get rejected. I wouldn’t be in this role today if I gave up the first time I didn’t get a role I wanted. Keep pushing.

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