Page 9 - PPO Diaries

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PPO Diaries

This is where the real challenge lies to manage the data according to the project needs.

Other challenges I faced include understanding the culture, values and ways of thinking of the employees at the
company. Many a times I started on the wrong foot due to misunderstanding. It will take a couple of days to
finally get in sync and then things got along smoothly for all. Since everyone is not expected to be on the same
page and have the same understanding of your work, it will be a challenge to make people understand and
realise about the importance, effect and results of your project to the company.

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

Let’s start with the wrong and end it on a “right” note. Getting into a whole new organisation with their own
culture and ways of working can be quite confusing to an intern, and so was it for me. There were multiple
occasions in my project where I failed to communicate my problems and needs to my mentor or to the other
employees as I had in mind. This kind of miscommunication had led to a lot of re-work and unnecessary issues
during the internship. Once I had failed to convey to my mentor that the magnitude of project deliverables
expected from me for 2 months is more than possible. As a result, my mentor had expectations initially that I
was fine with it only to understand after couple of weeks that it was indeed a burden in such a short span and
had to clip it down. The additional work I had to do in those few weeks became irrelevant to the other part of
my project which I could have easily assigned for doing some productive work for the project before. Hence,
from my mistakes I must advise you all to gauge how much of the project is doable by you and inform the
authorities straight away rather than falter on it later and make a disappointment to them.
Moving on to the right thing now, the first part of my project required me to devise an inventory model. My
mentor expected me to automate the whole model with codes so that no one was to get involved in the
intricacies of the working of the model and get the result straightway. Now in any internship the main catch is
to understand what the company wants the most and what is going to make them crazy. Automating the entire
cumbersome model was a difficult task but I put added efforts to finally come up with it. I did take help from all
sources available, invested all my efforts into that and finally presented the automation which was the cherry
on top for the project. That automation added the novelty and usefulness to the project that was needed in the
company. Previously inventory was decided based on consensus and mutual agreement, but the new
automated model gave a different dimension which was appreciated immensely as that was the need of the
hour. This was the right thing I realised and pulled out at the right time to make the project a successful one. It

might be quite simple for a student to code complex models but one must understand from the company point
of view, that it might be useful and not that easy for the company hence any contribution towards that direction
would add flavour to the project, and that is what one must understand and work upon.

❖ What are the things to keep in mind in the internship?

Firstly, an intern must be well versed with the basic supply chain and operations knowledge, because that’s
what is expected from a NITIEzen. A good understanding of SCM will definitely help one to know the context
of the problem and devise solutions for it. Secondly, an intern must be proficient in PEW – PowerPoint, Excel
and Word. These are the fundamental and crucial instruments in any project. A good knowledge of Excel VBA,
Tableau, R/Python Programming is expected from an intern and might give an upper edge to your project. But

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