Alison Shappy

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I graduated from SMC in May 2013 with a degree in Mathematics and a minor in Economics. I started working at the Vermont Teddy Bear Company in Shelburne, VT in June of 2013 and remained there until August of the following year, 2014. I was a Media Coordinator/Jr. Buyer for VTB at the time. The majority of my position was negotiating and buying advertising space in radio, TV, and print publications. I then moved to Boston, MA in September of 2014 where I continued my work in marketing at Decibel Media. I was a Media Planner, which focused more on building and executing media marketing campaigns for many different clients. It consisted of a lot of strategy planning, i.e. finding the right audience for the particular client, finding out where that particular demographic consumes the most media, finding the most cost efficient way to market to them, planning new and innovative ways to market, and executing these ideas while remaining within our designated budget.

After working for Decibel for about a year, and in media for about two years, I decided it was not my passion, as I wanted to work in a more numbers-based role. I could not be happier to say that in July of 2015, I was offered a job as a Regional Distribution Analyst for the Boston Beer Company. In this role I manage inventory at the wholesale level for 47 different wholesalers in Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC, West Virginia, Florida, and parts of Alabama. My daily tasks include order management, forecasting based on current depletion data and past sales trends, maintaining inventory level and in stock rating at each large wholesaler, and working collaboratively with both the wholesalers and the BBC sales reps in those regions. I am able to utilize my love for numbers and data much more freely in this role than in any other role I previously had. For example, one of our large tasks includes facilitating seasonal transitions when we transition from one season to the next. We have a hard date that we want each wholesaler to transition, so the weeks leading up to this date, I need to make sure the wholesaler will not run long with what they currently have on the floor or they won’t go out of stock too soon if they have too little on the floor. We are measured on our service level (in-stock ratings) and our truck utilization levels. We are held accountable for a portion of the logistics, such as truck weights and routing multi-stops.

My mathematics education and experience at SMC has helped me tremendously in both the media and operations fields. I was able to learn and execute marketing analysis and optimizations at a fast pace. In marketing, you use math more than you might expect. Everything is in terms of CPMs, which is a cost per thousand, GRPs, which is a point measurement system for radio shows, CPCs, which is a cost per click, CPA, which is a cost per acquisition, CTR, which is a click through rate, conversion rates, etc. In the operations field at BBC, I use my math background far more frequently than I did in media, which is why I prefer this position. I had zero supply chain experience going into this position, but was able to pick it up quickly as everything is grounded in math. I am a natural problem solver, as any Math student is, which is an invaluable asset for any employee to possess. At BBC, we forecast hundreds of different products on a daily basis for hundreds of different wholesalers. We calculate in stock rating and out of stock potential leading up to seasonal transitions and adjust our orders based on our findings. Everything is spoken in numbers and metrics. I love that I can ground my decisions, my successes, and sometimes my failures, in the numbers. I attribute all of my successes to my mathematics background from SMC. No matter where my career path takes me, I know that holding that degree and that experience will be an incredibly vital asset.