Second year at IIM Indore has started and I am back settling with heaps of case studies and chatting with classmates who have interned in different domains in different parts of the world. As I continue on this journey of studying at IIM Indore, the summer internship at Tata Steel has provided me with perspectives and insights about the steel industry, the company and especially about myself.
Close to 2 Lakh aspirants write various MBA entrance exams like CAT,XAT, IIFT, etc. A good chunk, almost 80-85%, of these aspirants comprises of engineering graduates. Similar pattern follows in almost all B-schools. I belong to this chunk and the aprehensions that follow when an engineer decides to change his path and pursue MBA are only too many. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have less apprehensions than you did before.
The European Union emerged in 1951 in order to mitigate the effects of World War 2 by facilitating duty free trade among the nations belonging to the European Union. The consortium initially constituted only six nations. It was initially only a coal and steel community, and later in 1957 the treaty of Rome created the ‘European economic community’. Britain however joined the community later in 1973. And in the aftermath of joining the group they went through a referendum in 1975, in order to decide whether or not to stay in the group, and, subsequently was part of Eurozone as majority were in favour of being a part of it.
4 April 2016 - After a hectic first year at college marked by crazy hours of lectures, surprise quizzes, committee work and of course group assignments, it was time for summer internship. I was very excited about these 2 months of training as for the first time in 16 years of my student life, it was time to map the theories I studied to the real world. I interned with Dabur India Limited -a leading FMCG company of India in their Sales and Marketing division Dabur made sure that I got the best of both worlds-by covering both sales and marketing, personal care division and health care division and also both of the metros Delhi and Mumbai. For my marketing stint, I worked in the shampoo category at the Dabur headquarters in Ghaziabad (NCR) for a month. My project was about the Go to Market for Dabur Almond Shampoo National Launch. After a long time, (after an established brand like Dabur Vatika Shampoo), Dabur was launching a new brand in shampoos category. It was exciting to witness a completely new product- not even a product variant, being launch. The thrill of working on a live project that too which covered such a magnanimous scale gives me a rush even now. My team showed enough faith in me to let me single-handedly execute a lot of projects. My recommendations in terms of in store visibility were actually executed while I was working. But all this came with great responsibility. Daily follow ups, meetings, negotiations with vendors and coordinating with sales team all over India. I worked on the placement norm and incentive planning, in store visibility elements, sponsorship deal etc for the product along with a shampoo market study for my own self learning while on the project. Working in the marketing department was amazing. I was on a floor with big brand managers serving the diverse portfolio of Dabur, always happy to share some marketing insights with you nearing the coffee machine with someone always playing a TVC in full volume in the background for the whole floor to hear. For my sales stint, I was send to Mumbai to study the distribution of Dabur Honey there. Mumbai is a crucial market for Dabur Honey. I had to study the sales trend in General Trade – channel wise, outlet type wise, area wise, current efficiencies (Coverage, Bill cuts and lines) and also buying behavior of shops. Basically a lot of company data to analyses and market visits all over Mumbai in the hot May! But it was fun talking to retailers, getting to know every nook and cranny of this new city, keeping pace with the super active salesmen and discussing sales achieved with him over a glass of Lassi from small food stalls. Based on my insights drawn from the market visits, I made a few recommendations in my final sales review which the senior sales management liked and assured me will be definitely executed. I was pleasantly surprised how despite being such a big and old organization, Dabur was so open to ideas from a young summer intern. My perception about big companies and their function changed completely. Overall, being a fresher, my key takeaways from my summer internship where not just about the working of a FMCG company but also about corporate life and culture. I gained a lot in terms of professionalism, work ethics and interpersonal skills. In my internship projects, I was actually able to map my Kotler lessons to what I was doing, but ofcourse working around a hundred constraints while executing them. Not one dull day I witnessed in those two months. New learning, new challenges and even new people everyday! These parts of my first corporate experience are something I’ll value forever.
This is the fourth edition of the annual Alumni Report on InsideIIM.com. This is part 4 of this year’s series. You can find other parts (Finance, Tech, Consulting) of the 2016 series here.
DDMRP is a formal planning and execution method designed to correct the inadequacies and inappropriate rules of conventional Material Requirements Planning (MRP) given today’s more volatile, complex and service oriented supply and manufacturing scenarios. The method was first fully articulated in the latest edition of Orlicky’s Material Requirements Planning (McGraw-Hill, 2011) co-authored by Carol Ptak and Chad Smith. Chad Smith serves as the CDDP Program Director. About the CDDP Program The Certified Demand Driven Planner Program was created by a global partnership between the International Supply Chain Education Alliance (ISCEA) and the Demand Driven Institute (DDI). Internationally accredited by the IISB, the purpose of the CDDP Program is to educate operations and supply chain personnel on the methods and applications of Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning (DDMRP). The CDDP Program is comprised of 10 modules delivered in 16 CONTACT hours over a 2 day time range. Testing is then completed through the ISCEA's iProctor system after course completion and through scheduled testing sessions. Upon successful completion of the exam participants receive a CDDP certificate and may place "CDDP" in their professional title. Two instructor led course by Ms. Carol Ptak is scheduled in India for students and corporate professionals during August 2016. The events will be at Mumbai and Pune.
Being a fresher meant having zero experience in a company. So, the summer internship was my first stint at a company with a responsibility on me. The company where I interned was a startup. It was a Fin-Tech company in the NBFC domain, catering majorly to the SMEs across the country.
