10 Dec Staff Spotlight | Carrie Bennett
At Gray & Adams, our greatest strength lies in our people. We’re committed to attracting, supporting, and retaining top talent, and we’re proud to have many dedicated team members who’ve built long and rewarding careers with us.
In this edition of our Staff Spotlight, we catch up with Carrie Bennett, who joined Gray & Adams in January 2024. Based at our Dunfermline depot, Carrie plays a key role as a Production Assistant.
Can you tell us about your role at Gray & Adams and what a typical day looks like for you?
My day starts off by attending the managers meeting to take minutes. After that the main and most important job every day is running Dunfermline’s Production Schedule, its purpose is providing the build plans for every week, projecting future builds, controlling the panel schedule that Fraserburgh uses for production of kits, helps the drawing office plan their timeline. Other daily tasks include identifying and assigning chassis when arrive on site, allocating hours to jobs going through workshops, actioning amendments when required. I assist our Production Manager Graham with daily tasks as required and help him with any requests he may have. I also liaise with subcontractors daily to ensure arrival on site when required.
What inspired you to join the Gray & Adams team?
Before joining Gray and Adams I worked for many years as a funeral director, as you would imagine this was physically and an emotionally demanding job with unsociable hours, with long commutes across the east of Scotland but helping families in their greatest time of need made every minute of my service to the industry rewarding. It came the time for change and luckily my friend and colleague previously within the funeral industry who had recently joined Gray and Adams in November 2023 said a position was opening and would be a 5-minute commute from home to work, Sarah told me how much she was enjoying her new role, the team and return of a work/life balance. It ticked all the boxes I had on my wish list for a new career, and I have never looked back.
Since starting your journey here, what would you say has been your proudest achievement?
Probably incorporating the panel schedule to feed off of live information from the production schedule, before these were two separate tasks which was proving time consuming and sometimes causing a wee bit of mayhem if builds had been shuffled a little. Now it runs from the one database and feeds the two separate pivot tables with the information required for production purposes. It shows real time information and changes which has proved successful for liaising with Davy in Fraserburgh who uses this to plan his schedule for Dunfermline’s needs.
If you had the opportunity to step into a different role at Gray & Adams for a day, whose job would you choose and why?
I would like to be a driver for the day and use the tractor unit as this looks fun to drive and manoeuvre. I would also like to drive some of the bigger rigids just for the sheer fun of driving a large vehicle.
What do you enjoy most about being part of the Gray & Adams family?
I enjoy the people I work with daily which makes me enjoy my job even more. Everyone welcomed me and made me feel like I had always been part of the team. I also have the privilege of sharing an office with two amazing people with long service histories within Gray & Adams, both with so much knowledge they impart, educate and guide me daily.