Foraying into Field Operations

Author Bio
Jeff Mallory is the director of contracting and procurement, as well as the general manager – of field operations for Taylors International Services (Taylors). Taylors is a global catering services provider headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the USA. Their operational span includes oil gas, government, military and diplomatic missions across the globe. Jeff is based in Constanta, Romania, where Taylors provides dining services to the NATO mission at Mihail Kogălniceanu Airbase. Throughout his career, Jeff has led Projects within the defence and government contracting space in Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe, the United States and the Gulf Region.

Taylors field operations include a broad array of customers and missions, each with unique data, information management and reporting requirements. Given the complexities of supporting government, military and diplomatic missions, we will discuss these in some detail. 

Often, we find ourselves mobilising a large number of personnel in support of highly demanding yet short-duration (6 months or less) missions in support of our customer sets. In support of operational requirements, Taylors is often placed in a position where we must mobilise a large number of food service professionals in a very short time frame. As an example, in supporting the rapidly assembled Afghan Refugee Mission at Forts McCoy and Lee in the United States, Taylors had less than three days to recruit, retain and transport several hundred personnel from disparate locations across the United States to the respective military installations in Wisconsin and Virginia where the mission was performed. 

In addition to the inherent complexities of facilitating staffing within the required timeline, we also had to secure hotel accommodations for these individuals as well as ground transport to the work sites.

As one can imagine, the number of moving parts was significant, and we quickly discovered that we had no central repository to maintain and manage employee data, prepare work schedules, monitor attendance and time reporting, sick days, absences and similar requirements. This challenge was further exacerbated by the simple fact that we brought in management and leadership personnel from across the globe in an effort to execute with effect. The Afghan Refugee Mission was Taylors first foray into defence-related contracting within the United States. Our leadership team quickly came to the realisation that we lacked appropriate information management systems and processes to effectively support the combined requirements of the customer, the corporation and our employees. In an effort to address these multiple reporting and information management requirements, we failed to look strategically at the requirements; rather, we hastily developed multiple sub-portals on SharePoint, implemented antiquated paper time reporting and tasked far too many people with sub-tasks and reports management. Rather quickly, we identified the multitude of errors in our approach and began to rapidly look for a solution that was cost-effective, scalable and cloud-based whilst simultaneously recognising that, from a corporate perspective, we must upgrade our legacy systems to support new customer sets, information management and reporting requirements.

Led by our government-facing project and field operations teams, Taylors quickly gravitated to a cloud-based suite availed by Monday.com. This suite enabled us to perform management of employee data, scheduling, and timekeeping and to extract key reporting data for internal and external stakeholders. The Monday.com product suite was optimal for the situation at hand – a mix of scalability, affordability and value, further coupled with modularity required to manage multiple functions. As the field operation matured, the solution set implemented also matured and was essential to the mission success and, ultimately, the profitability of these key contracts.

Taylors initial foray into defence contracting on a large scale was highly successful, with significant credit for that attributable to the adaptation of the aforementioned cloud-based solution. Taylors has successfully leveraged this to grow the defence-focused business across the United States and into Europe and is currently pursuing additional opportunities across multiple global regions.