In this article, Arka Chaudhury ,a student of SIBM Pune who interned at SKF India in the Operations and Supply Chain domain, talks about his summer internship experience. Find out about how he prepared for the summer placements, his onboarding process, his experiences & what his learnings are during this internship.
Hi, Tell us about how you got selected for this internship? Take us through the moment you realized you had got the internship.
I got this internship through campus recruitment drive. There was a shortlisting round followed by cognitive tests, psychometric tests and based on that further shortlisted for an interview. The interview started with various HR based questions regarding the previous experiences, toughest situations faced and few domain related questions, then few related to the job requirements with previous experience and field of study, followed by a guestimate and final questions from the HR. The results were declared on the same day of the process.
On joining the company as an intern, how has your onboarding experience been like?
I am called to the company location in Pune, though due to the COVID scenario, with limited workforce in the manufacturing sector, it has been a mix of offline and online experience. We had a virtual induction with us sitting at the company guest house. We had a visit to the plant and then the next day, lockdown happened. There have been various issues initially pertaining to limited availability of guides and resources to start with it at the beginning but once the processes became clearer, the internship became smoother.
How has your interaction with the team members and colleagues been like? How will you make sure to leave the best impression on your supervisors by the end of the internship?
In this COVID scenario, being a part of an online-offline internship, the manufacturing sector with limited workforce where everyone is overloaded, the scenario has been challenging. The interactions have been mostly online for a fixed amount of time unplanned either in office hours or off-hours whenever they were available. The understanding of the processes involved interacting with as many people in the organization and understanding the pain-points of the problem definition and creating an impression by considering every internal stakeholder involved.
Tell us in brief, about the project you are currently working on and how is this project going to help the company?
My project is mainly about regularization of an import process with all the involvement of different teams like Sales, Logistics, customer service and various external stakeholders involved. My part is to clearly define the roles of different parties and streamline the entire supply chain end-to-end and connecting all the fragments together focusing on the reliability. This will involve various performance trackers which will be integrated with their internal tool so, every one can get a real time visibility of the process.
Give us an overview of how you prepared for your summer placement season.
The college organized sessions for the summer placements preparation, which gave an understanding of our current level. Based on their feedback, we got a hint of how to start our preparation. Normally, we are given an entire preparatory material for our specialization, and understanding of concepts from sessions organized by special interest groups gave us the complete gist of the subject. Along with this, getting yourself daily updated with the news and the company background gives us the final touch before appearing for the placement season.
Based on your internship experience till now, what are some necessary skill sets one must be prepared with before starting an internship?
First of all, a student should try and gather knowledge in-depth about the industry they are about to work in. Secondly, the basic idea about different processes in different departments might help you in understanding during the internship, the ground reality which is read and seen is quite different. And finally, getting your hands dirty in tools like Excel (must), PowerBI, or Tableau whatever the company prefers, and Python in some cases might come in handy.
What are some new skills that you have developed while working in the company?
So, my internship is in the Logistics department, so I have to go to the distribution center (warehouse), I learned about the process of how a shipment is handled from there. My project is in EXIM (Export-Import) shipment domain, so I gained the entire end-to-end understanding of the process. Got a chance to interact with multiple stakeholders in the process, how much part of the work can be handled automatically and how much is done manually. Different portals used and different tools used.
My project was regarding regularizing the process and also automate different parts. So learned how different systems can be integrated and worked on automating them.
What are some of the challenges that you have faced in your internship and how have you overcome them?
In the initial days, even being present at the location, there was an understaffing issue as many employees were not available due to the pandemic. Due to this, the other employees were overloaded and the interns were not getting the guidance. I faced issues of clarity of my deliverables and not getting much support.
There was no pre-defined guide and my topic being in import-export shipments, few people had complete knowledge and this kind of thing cannot be captured in detail from any internet source. With time, I started connecting with as many cross-functional people on different online and offline platforms, whoever available and trying to learn a new thing at a time. The scenario was very intense and we completely understood.
Gradually, once the situation got better, I started going to the plant and my work gained momentum after that.
Tell us about a situation where you were complemented by your Manager for your work.
With my project being in the logistics department, I understood the ground realities of different processes being done manually, and finding an automated route was difficult. My manager always told me, we know the pain points and asked me to come up with a unique solution for the same.
With this motivation, I was able to completely develop and implement a first-of-its-kind automated process tracker, integrating multiple systems (many external and internal stakeholders all working on different systems) fully developed in-house in a very short span of time. The solution was presented to different teams for their use, and the portal gained attention in a very short time.
This kind of thing gained appreciation all around.
What have been your major learnings during the internship?
My major learning I believe is the import-export domain which I had no prior knowledge of.
Secondly, had my hands on various tools like PowerBI, Automation tools, Internal tools during the period, which I have learned and used in-depth.
The third and the most important learning was in a scenario of COVID, with multiple hurdles all around, how you can maximize out of your internship. This kind of experience which was nothing short of a roller coaster ride being in an online-offline setting was a major learning curve in my career.
Tell us about your final presentation of the project to your manager in brief. What was the toughest question asked during the presentation and how did you answer it?
My final presentation with the country management team head (VP in my case), different HR heads, and HRBUs assigned along with the managers. But, unfortunately, my manager was not able to come on the same day as he was not feeling well.
So, initially, it was challenging to handle the presentation without having any support. There were multiple questions asked in between the presentation specifically around 10 questions on each slide. As my project involved a lot of technical stuff, the toughest part was explaining and everything in layman terms so it becomes understandable to every target present on the table. I got a lot of appreciation at the end, so I hope I have handled it nicely.
Some advice that you would like to give to your juniors based on your internship experience.
One of the major pieces of advice, I feel which I think especially in these tough times, is that there will be a lot of situations where you might feel you don't have any support, people won't be able to give you any time and you might feel you are stuck in your project.
In such a situation, I would suggest becoming shameless and try contacting as many people as possible, someone or the other will give you time and you will learn something new from everyone. At the end of the day, you have a limited time and you have to deliver a good project from your learning as well as from the company's perspective.
Your solution should be able to help you solve at least someone's problems in the organization and should bring some business impact. Trust me, the ground realities are very different from what you study.
What was one of the best moments according to you during your internship?
There were few moments which I think like meeting my college mates for the first time which was made possible due to this internship, meeting different team members in the office, and hanging out with them.
The best one I would say was on the last day when my manager arranged a farewell for me and different team members from the Logistics (my team) and warehouse team gathered.
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