Manager, Control Tower & Service Delivery

The opportunity:

The role of Manager, Control Tower Service Delivery (CTSD) is a critical part of making Flexport’s mission to make global trade easy for everyone a reality. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries. In this role, you will join our Customer Care organization as a key people leader, driving operational execution, customer excellence, and sustainable growth across your scope of responsibility.

You will lead, direct, and optimize a regional team, enabling our customers to optimize their end-to-end supply chains through advanced purchase order (PO) management, booking management, and control tower service solutions.

Utilizing your strong freight forwarding expertise and ocean market knowledge, you will drive continuous service improvements to ensure complete customer satisfaction and service delivery in line with global CT standards. Your success is measured by your ability to drive customer retention, maintain best-in-class data quality, optimize the cost-to-serve, and scale high-performing operational teams across Asia Pacific.

Your primary objectives are driving high levels of service quality, executing strategic customer engagement, and ensuring continuous improvement of processes and controls across the region. You will do this in close collaboration with internal operational, commercial, product, and gateway stakeholders while focusing on the following key objectives:

People Leadership & Strategic Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Empowerment: Manage, mentor, and inspire a regional CTSD program manager team. Review daily trends, achievements, and operational challenges to set clear daily objectives and empower your team to meet them.
• Talent Development & Delegation: Selectively delegate activities to give team members opportunities to expand their portfolios and gain new experiences. Provide continuous feedback, coaching, and guidance anchored in skills matrices and personal development plans.
• Customer Engagement & Growth: Focus on customer retention, satisfaction, and growth through high service quality. Partner closely with commercial key stakeholders, sea logistics leads, and regional management to continuously optimize the customer experience.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Engage daily with operations, gateway teams, and business development peers to ensure seamless cross-functional alignment, drive customer retention, and pursue profitable growth across targeted trade lanes.
• Financial & P&L Oversight: Accountable for analyzing team P&L, deploying strategic initiatives to optimize performance, and delivering against all financial targets and strategic objectives for APAC.
• Process Innovation & Improvement: Regularly explore innovative operational ideas, establish team consensus, and execute process improvements that eliminate waste, enhance controls, and increase productivity.

Tactical Responsibilities

• Best-in-Class Onboarding: Ensure seamless, structured customer onboarding for new Control Tower accounts, establishing clear operational frameworks from day one.
• Data Quality & Reporting Excellence: Enforce rigorous process controls to ensure complete and correct customer contact data, high-level data integrity, milestone timeliness, and accurate client reporting.
• PO & Shipment Governance: Actively manage interfaces and data exchange across your team and key stakeholders to ensure effective, efficient purchase order and shipment management.
• Stakeholder Relationship Management: Maintain close relationships with internal and external clients as well as senior stakeholders to gather feedback, identify operational gaps, and resolve systemic challenges.
• Milestone & Trend Analysis: Start each day reviewing operational metrics, shipment milestone timeliness, and service levels to spot risks early and deploy preventive solutions.
• Operational Escalation Checkpoint: Serve as the key escalation lead for complex customer service issues, driving rapid issue resolution and proactive service recovery.

Scope of Duties

1. Customer Care & Growth Management

• Own, monitor, and drive all CT customer care development activities within your scope.
• Build direct, high-trust relationships with key client counterparts and internal commercial leads.
• Conduct regular service reviews to evaluate performance against customer SLAs and strategic goals.

2. Purchase Order & Shipment Execution

• Oversee day-to-day execution of order management (OM) and shipment management workflows.
• Ensure accurate data flow across client systems, internal operational tools, and gateway interfaces.
• Identify and eliminate operational bottlenecks that impact PO visibility or shipment progress.

3. Operational Governance & Data Quality

• Establish robust auditing mechanisms to maintain data quality and milestone accuracy.
• Ensure strict adherence to global CT operating procedures and regional compliance standards.
• Drive automated reporting and system usage to reduce manual workloads for the customer care team.

4. General Duties

• Lead daily stand-ups, team retrospectives, and cross-functional syncs to keep teams aligned.
• Support regional leadership on broader supply chain, software capability, and operational enhancement projects.
• Live and act with integrity, guided by company values to maintain a high bar for operational quality and service excellence.

What you will need

Experience:

• Education: BA/BS degree required (Supply Chain, Logistics, or Business Administration preferred).
• Work Experience: Minimum 5+ years of experience in order/booking management Control Towers, freight forwarding, ocean logistics, or control tower customer care operations.
• Leadership Experience: Proven track record in a people management role leading customer care or supply chain operations teams.

Mindset:

• Customer Excellence Obsession: Deeply focused on delivering outstanding client experiences and driving long-term customer retention.
• Strategic & Commercial Acumen: Ability to connect daily operational execution with P&L performance, commercial strategy, and business growth.
• Continuous Improvement Drive: Passionate about refining workflows, eliminating manual friction, and adopting innovative ideas to scale operations.
• Collaborative & Empathetic Leader: Skilled at coaching, delegating, and fostering an empowered team environment while maintaining high accountability.
• Strong Time Management: Highly organized with the ability to balance daily operational firefighting with long-term strategic planning.

Skills:

• Order Management Expertise: Deep operational knowledge of PO management, ocean logistics, and origin/destination workflows.
• P&L & Financial Management: Ability to manage unit economics, analyze financial performance, and drive cost-to-serve efficiencies.
• Process Optimization & Control: Skilled in building data quality controls, designing work processes, and establishing feedback loops.
• Stakeholder Management & Negotiation: Exceptional communication skills to build alignment across clients, internal squads, and senior executive leaders.
• Root-Cause Problem Solving: Ability to leverage data metrics to identify operational trends, diagnose root causes, and implement lasting solutions.

Scope of Duties: 

1. Client System Maintenance

• Regularly update and verify client data in the management system for accuracy
• Perform routine checks and audits to ensure system integrity
• Continuously improve system processes to enhance data management efficiency

1. Client Allocation Management

• Managing client-level allocation and pre-planning
• Overseeing BCO client's allocation management and assignment
• Addressing client expectations and handling escalations related to allocations
• Timely shipment troubleshooting and exception escalation / handling
• Work intimately with the Flexport account management team, planning team and operations team to ensure an effective end-to-end export process.

3.General Duties

• Coach Program Managers on the daily job. 
• Support internal and external clients to make the best decision with your expertise;
• Live and act with integrity guided by the company values including sustaining a high bar for operational quality and service.
• Inform the business process and software capability needs to help scale our growing team while improving quality, service, efficiency and regulatory compliance.
• Contribute to the development and implementation of the procedure and system to differentiate Flexport operations from the industry.

What you will need:

Experience:

• BA/BS degree 
• Minimum 5+ years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, or consulting (ocean freight knowledge is a plus), 
• At least 2-3+ years in a people management role.

Mindset:

• Desire to “build a better machine” and get irritated when things aren’t optimal
• Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinking with strong problem-solving capabilities 
• Strategic vision and ground floor execution
• Excitement to manage vendor relations and create best-in-class, innovative structures to do so
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills
• A client service mindset; you are obsessed with client and squad happiness
• Next-level attention to detail
• Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!

• Flexibility to get the job done when needed. Willing to work outside office hours and occasional weekend or night shifts in certain locations.

Skills:

• Building and using your work process
• Optimizing processes analytically
• Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work
• Applying policy, process, and best practices
• Problem solving 3b: solving problems through hypothesis-based root cause analysis
• Problem Solving 3c: solving problems through theory and experimentation
• Generating ideas through data
• Building feedback loops for a product or service
• Executing complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities

Skill Glossary

Building and using your work process

A process is a step by step approach you can use to outline your work. It’s easy to mistake a process for a milestone. Milestones are time restricted goals. For example, when writing a book, a milestone could be to complete the first draft of the book in four months. This is different from the process for writing each chapter, which might comprise a few steps. For example, the first step is to compile stories, evidence, and data; the second step is to organize each of those elements, etc. Any type of work can have a process like this. An engineer’s process, for instance, includes understanding the product requirements, building a fast mockup, and creating the data model, among others. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the top comedians of all time, has a process where he tries to write five jokes every day. His goal isn't to write five funny jokes, just five jokes (whether they're good or bad).  Creating a process is not only about tactical performance. You can think of a process like a product that is continuously being improved. For example, when writing Primed to Perform, Lindsay and Neel adapted their process as they learned what did and did not work.
Fluency in this skill typically includes:

• Building a process to help you do high quality work.
• Breaking up your work into small daily chunks of activity that guide you towards your vision and plan.
• Checking in with colleagues or leaders throughout the process.
• Adapting your process as you learn.
• Designing each chunk of work to be useful in driving a learning outcome.
• Following the 'pencils-down' principle so that if you were asked to stop your work at any time, what you have would be useful to your customer.
• Using technology to help you manage your process. 
• Habitually creating processes for any large body of work.