Page 15 - PPO Diaries

PPO Diaries

❖ What did you do right and what did you do wrong?

I feel, what I did right was to keep my manager in loop throughout the 2 month duration, taking regular
feedbacks from him kept me on-track. Moreover, I would say that I was lucky enough to find relevant research
papers to support the scientific technique for demand forecasting of NPIs.
What I did wrong was to not start preparing my presentation from the very beginning. During my mid-review,
my interim ppt lacked content and it did not do justice to the amount of work I had done till date. My mid-
review didn’t go well.

❖ what are the things to keep in mind in the internship?
i) Effective communication is the key. Asking questions before starting our work is extremely
important and we must always look for the underlying objective behind the assigned task. Simply
finishing our work would never help us.
ii) Figuring out all the stakeholders associated with your work is extremely important. While working
with SCM team, we need to map the interests of sales & marketing departments along with our
insights before arriving at any conclusion.
iii) Give Bold recommendations, but always back them up with appropriate data.
iv) Never outrightly point out mistakes in the current processes. Be humble and put forth your
recommendations for improvements. It is always better to tell someone that if we do a task other
way round, our productivity will increase rather than telling them that they are doing this the
wrong way.

❖ What pre-internship preparation do you suggest for juniors?

Brush up your concepts of operations & supply chain. Being from NITIE, we don’t want to be caught flat foot
in areas like forecasting, inventory optimization & warehousing.

Learn at least one tool to make a visually appealing Dashboard, be it Macros in Excel or R/python etc. It will
give you brownie points while you present your work to higher management.

And the most important aspect. There can be cases where you feel that the scope of your summer project is
too narrow and there is a lot more that you can accomplish in these 2-months. In such cases, finish the
assigned tasks asap and step-up to your mentor with your recommendations as to what else can be done.

On the flip side, if the scope of your project is too wide. Talk to your mentor about the possibilities of
narrowing it down to specific objectives. Because, in the end, the achieved objectives will be weighed against
the assigned tasks.

❖ Anything else you would like to add

Summer Internships are not about getting a PPO.

It is an opportunity for us to analyse whether this is the right organization for us to work. While the
management team is assessing us on various fronts, it is also important that we assess the organization and
decide whether this is the culture that we fit in.

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