Dawn Of Digital Transformation - Internship Experience At Thermofisher Scientific

I am Piyush Chaskar, pursuing business analytics at SCMHRD. I interned with Thermofisher Scientific’s marketing department.

“Data is the new oil” has become such a cliché, that I was laughed at when I mentioned it during an interview. These days, anyone spending a few hours learning the quick-fix courses online claims to be a data scientist. Learn a few lines of code, few statistical models, and transform into data scientist or business analytics consultants. It is only when the metal hits the road, you understand it’s strength, such was my internship experience at Thermofisher Scientific.

The primary aim of my internship was to drive a shift to online sales channels. To embark on this digital journey, two tasks were identified to be crucial. The first task was to improve customer’s online experience and second was to enable surgical actions for each customer and business unit. These surgical actions were to be identified based on intelligent insights from past sales and transaction history.

Having worked in the industry for close to 4 years, I have witnessed many leaders treating analytics as a science fair project. Why wouldn’t they? They have been conducting traditional statistical analysis since time immemorial. Presentations in the leadership meeting have always been filled with graphs and charts. Cost vs benefits has not matched for many who followed the herd into advanced analytics and digital transformations of their business. Analytics-driven strategies are more than just parsing data and putting in advanced tools.

Under the guidance of my mentor Susmita Kundu (Lead, Digital Analytics & e-business marketing), I started by asking key questions such as what is the size of the opportunity? How much additional revenue could be moved to digital? Which products to focus on? And then we dug deeper. Various hypotheses were tested for their validation. Data cleaning, web scrapping and validation took tremendous effort. The implementation of various statistical models and algorithms in search of key insights was exciting. A complete overview of landscape and insights were neatly designed and displayed in Power BI dashboard. The dashboard was extremely simple. Yet, each number and item on the dashboard was a target and metric for the proposed digital transformation.

My mentor connected with me every day to answer even the silliest of my doubts. She encouraged me to produce ideas and never limit my thoughts. In her opinion, no idea was a bad idea. The Mid review served as course correction as Mihir Deshpande (Director Marketing) added a leadership view on the deliverables. During reviews, I also learned the importance of telling the story behind data. To add flavor to this wholistic experience, I was also given small projects which were to be completed by the vendor. I was responsible for communicating business requirements and getting work done from the vendor in stipulated time. This virtual internship was thoroughly rewarding. It felt like a guide to life after MBA, completed through personalized mentoring.

The quality of the project, amount of time and effort invested by my mentor and reviewer showcased that they meant business. I am eternally grateful to them for such a wonderful learning experience. Finally, I believe that when exposed to the real-world business problem, SCMHRD’s emphasis on domain knowledge and hands-on course structure proved it’s worth.