She began her career as a buyer and moved her way up as product manager, purchasing manager and, most recently, Ontario’s operations manager. Through hard work, experience and dedication, Sandra has earned this position. In her new role, Sandra is responsible for all of the Sonepar companies in Ontario including Gescan Ontario and Texcan Ontario.
Strong teams achieve success
Sandra has spent most of her Sonepar Canada career as a team leader. She credits her ability to create strong and effective teams to the following principles:
• Lead by example – Sandra does not believe in micro managing or ‘passing the buck’. She believes in showing her team that she would do anything they do or would ask them to do.
• Build on people’s strengths – Sandra believes in identifying people’s strengths. “Concentrate on them – recognize them. There is no sense in forcing someone to do a job that they will never be good at if another member of the team can excel at it. By recognizing people’s strengths we move a lot faster toward our goals”
• Strive for a positive corporate culture – Sandra encourages a rewarding environment that people want to be a part of. “When people take ownership of their work, a genuine passion and enthusiasm is generated. When we recognize each individual’s contribution, it makes everyone want to do better.”
Thinking like a customer
When it comes to customer service, Sandra knows what it takes to excel – empathy. “It is more than simply telling employees to put their feet in the customer’s shoes or to think like a customer – it is asking them how they would want to be treated. Once we all understand that, we will meet our customers’ expectations.”
Learning through experience
Over the years, Sandra has seen many changes occur in the company. If asked, she will tell you her biggest challenge to date was the creation of a single operations group from the three that existed in Gescan Ontario, Texcan Ontario and Trade Electric, in 2003. “Each company had their own corporate culture and standards of operations.”
In order to overcome this challenge, Sandra recognized the strengths of each company, determined best practices and utilized them to build one strong team. It took a while, during which time the operations team received much resistance, but by concentrating on doing things better, every day, and adapting to change, the Operations group has become a successful, constantly evolving team. “In addition to being my biggest challenge, I believe that my role during this transition period was my biggest contribution to Sonepar.”
Looking to the future
What Sandra looks most forward to in this position is the opportunity to play an active role in every aspect of the business. “My goal is to help grow the business in Ontario by building a solid structure that ensures every company is working effectively. “We have many excellent people working for Sonepar in Ontario. I want to provide a structure that will allow our teams to not only be creative, but will allow us to implement their creative, fresh ideas.”
She intends to be proactive and recognize trends in the marketplace in order to adapt to customers’ changing needs. In addition, she looks forward to providing value to both sides of the business – vendors and customers – to ensure that Sonepar is recognized as a value-added service provider.
“Sonepar Canada offers us many tools to help us reach customers. One of them is Eleknet – an e-commerce tool that offers customers unique ordering flexibility 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sonepar Canada in Ontario can also learn from the example of other very successful companies in Canada – Gescan West, Lumen and Texcan West.”
