Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes in e-commerce as you go about your Christmas shopping and plan your festive parties?
Isabel Chng, former Engineering Systems and Design student at SUTD, now works at RedMart as an Industrial Engineer. We checked in with her a year after her graduation in 2017…
Share a little about what you do at RedMart.
I work with the developers, UX designers, transport operations and drivers to manage, test and roll-out new features and improvements to our in-house delivery application. Each project usually involves a lot of iterative testing, liaising with the technology and operations teams, as well as on the ground implementation.
How do you make a difference from behind-the-scenes of the online retail industry?
In my role, I introduce improvements to the e-commerce processes and application, such as enhancing features and performing debugging to facilitate and smoothen out the delivery process. This helps to ensure our customers receive the perfect order on time. In building a more efficient last mile solution, I play a part in optimising the online retail experience of our customers.
How has your time at SUTD helped prepare you for an e-commerce career?
SUTD has prepared me well to handle multiple stakeholders from diverse fields, and be able to apply logical design thinking to troubleshoot and optimise processes. Most of this preparation came from the multiple Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) projects with industry partners, where we learn to handle real world problems and account for variables, unforeseen anomalies and be less daunted when we actually step out into the industry.
With the current competitive and fast moving e-commerce landscape in Singapore, companies are paying increasing amounts of attention to become more efficient and leaner. SUTD prepares its graduates to identify process bottlenecks and ideate for solutions to help companies and processes become leaner and smoother.
What made you choose to join SUTD?
At that point in time for school selection I was very interested in trying to optimise processes and make things more efficient, which was why I eventually decided to pursue Engineering Systems and Design at SUTD.
What do you enjoy most about working in the e-commerce industry?
Everything is very fast moving and I enjoy having to constantly adapt and be flexible to all the challenges and changes that can happen anytime.
