Report on Internship at Henkel Company

Job Description

My internship takes place in Henkel Company. Henkel operates worldwide with leading innovations, brands and technologies in three different business units: adhesive technologies, beauty care and home- laundry care. Founded in 1876, Henkel holds globally leading market positions both in the consumer and in the industrial businesses with well-known brands such as Persil, Schwarzkopf and Loctite. Henkel has a total of fifty three thousand employees, operating in twenty countries worldwide.

The department that I am placed is the demand planning department. Demand planning is part of the back office operations and more specifically of the supply chain. For a big multinational, supply chain has a vital role and includes many sub-departments such as supply planning, procurement, raw & pack purchasing, logistics and others. Nevertheless for many companies and especially for Henkel, most of the activities are done centrally and only demand planning, customer service and logistics (warehouse management & outbound transportation) are done in a domestic level. Demand planning works as a link among main operations of the company, like sales, marketing, trade marketing, finance and logistics and tries to coordinate them. The target is to reach the highest service level of customers, while keeping the stock in the lowest level possible. It is crucial for any company, to absolutely satisfy their customers and not lose revenues, and at the same time keep stock levels low in order not to have amounts of money unexploited in a warehouse. To achieve that, our department analyzes master and historical data, communicates with the other departments and uses certain programs to generate demand forecast reports. The results are mainly measured with the forecast accuracy (FCA) and BIAS indicators. My job as an intern is to learn how to handle the data, use the SAP ERP system and help the department achieve its goals.

Expectations

Three months may be a short period of time, but I personally believe that it can be enough to gain multiple experiences if you stay focused. Having past working experience in our family business, I already knew from the moment of application, that my expectations should be exact. One of the main reasons why I applied for the internship instead of the career development or dissertation project, is that I wanted to get familiar with the processes, expectations and working style of the big multinational companies. From my point of view, big multinationals work as organizations you can benefit a lot from in personal, professional and social level, due to the fact that their size and values transform them from simple enterprises to small societies. In addition, I expect a challenging professional environment and healthy working conditions, mostly regarding my acceptance and relationships with the other colleagues. Moreover, I am really eager to acquire hands on knowledge of the demand planning job, aim and core challenges. What’s more, it is significant for me to have a dynamic, flexible, fair and helpful supervisor with expertise in the sector. To be honest, I observed most of these in my supervisor from the interview, that’s why I tried my best in order to pass the three months of my internship next to him.

One final expectation from my side, is to participate actively in the company’s activities, meetings and team’s tasks, something that will contribute to make the most out of these three intense months. After a small conversation with my supervisor I learned the company’s expectations from me. To begin with, my supervisor mentioned the meaning he gives, to see from me willingness to learn and potentially apply academically acquired knowledge to existing processes and tasks. Secondly, I am expected to manage effectively specific demand (and supply) planning tasks and support my supervisor in ad hoc requests. Thirdly, become a valued member of the team that shows ethos and commitment, even for this period of time. Lastly, our mutual expectation is to get a good feeling of how big multinational companies operate and what kind of interaction a Supply Chain employee has with his business counterparts.

Career Planning

It is generally accepted that career planning is one of the most difficult tasks in life. It is an endless procedure that starts in a very early age and goes on till our retirement. In my opinion, career planning should start with a very deep vocational guidance which should aim to help the youngsters find out their talents. Actually, talking in managerial terms, a thorough SWOT analysis should be done for every single student, so that the strengths are recognized and opportunities are discovered. Nevertheless, usually in societies like the Greek, at least the first serious career decisions, meaning the academic studies, are taken on purpose or unintentionally, strongly influenced by the family. My story does not differ a lot. Grown up in a family enterprise and being the eldest child of two boys, my occupation in the company started in high school when I was a student of Anatolia college. The love and passion that my self-made father passed to me for the family business along with his successful development throughout the years, played a strong role in my decision to follow management studies in the University of Macedonia. Our company deals with trading and logistics of Ho.Re.Ca consumer goods.

My involvement in the business was intense and simultaneous with my university studies. I worked every day in rolling positions from warehouse worker to salesman, while I was following my father to every business trip or important meeting. I started getting a very good sense of our activities and jobs and progressively took more and more responsibilities. After four years of experience, I was given the opportunity to be in charge of our new branch in Chalcidice, where I mainly leaded the Sales department, compiled by three people. As the numbers show, it was a successful decision, if we take into account that the sales of our main product there (Illy coffee) increased by 70% and 45% the first and second year of operation. Although everything seemed to develop positively, my strong involvement with our enterprise made me leave behind my academic studies, something opposite to my general goal.

After my decision to follow the economic studies and by entering University, my general future goal was born. I want to become an exceptional individual of the business world, with a strong educational background and extensive professional experience, ready to deploy any opportunity given. I can see myself as a business executive in company or as an entrepreneur. Although my dream is to take advantage of the sustainable business my family has built, be a successful successor and grow it in all ways. I believe that the succession process of family businesses is something very difficult and a transition need discipline and effort. It is important to mention that globally only three out of ten family businesses continue their operation successfully after their transition to the second generation. In order to make my best for the succession I strongly support that I have to try hard and prove to my family that I am better equipped than the first generations in all aspects. Only If I show my worth and managerial skills I will be able to take total control.

In order to deploy my strategy I segmented my targets. Educationally wise, I wanted to graduate from University and continue my studies with an MSc in a respectful institute like Alba. In the future, I plan to be really pitched with my studies and choose carefully, possible courses that are linked to my job and I would like to attend (e.g. negotiation skills at Alba). What really matters for me is to endorse my soft skills and get professional experience from diverse environments. That’s the main reason why I enjoyed lots of courses like “presenting effectively” and also I chose the direction of the internship project. I hope that after a lot of work in the framework of the family business, working for a big multinational, even for a short period will help me see things from a different perspective and lead to my personal development. After my experience in Henkel and the end of my MSc, I plan to finish my military obligations and then get back to hard work.

Management in Action

As stated previously, demand planning is an interactive department and theory from many fields could be considered as relevant. Nevertheless, from my point of view and after my supervisor’s confirmation, the two more relevant courses I took at Alba are the Quantitative Methods for Business and Production & Operations Management. Quantitative Methods for Business can be relevant in terms of managing data effectively. Besides the fact that Mathematics can be found behind almost every mechanism of our everyday life, the part of the course involved with descriptive statistics and distributions can help in the better explanation and understanding of tables and formulas. Often, mistakes can be made in apparently obvious problems. For example, the choice of the mean, mode or median for a particular decision. Production & Operations Management is the more relevant of the two. The need to find the most efficient ways to produce or transport a product or service was one of the main pillars of the course. Additionally, cost reduction is a basic interest of the supply chain department in order to increase profitability and gain competitive advantage in the market. Let’s not forget to mention that this course can really contribute to the breakdown and better understanding of the way the ERP system operates and the criteria with which the models are selected to execute the various transactions.

Quantitative Techniques are about the analysis of quantities (measured in physical, so-called objective data). These techniques are scientific in nature, their objective is to provide procedure and process that will aid or assist problem solving. These techniques being scientific in nature are model (mathematically) – based and therefore, follow very good logical (step by step) order. The quantitative techniques can really be impactful in the business methods as they shows the results of the processes and decision making before the implementation actually saves time, money and efforts of the company by providing the overview of the results of the techniques which is considered by the top management to implement in the industrial and business models.

HENKEL provides its services around the globe. The decision making regarding investments and top of that logistics and other operations is really critical and top management needs to know the results and outcomes before they can invest in the certain projects. Quantitative techniques provide a lot of information regarding the final outcomes. Like the entire business world, HENKEL can also rely on these quantitative techniques for their decision making in order to reduce the risks, enhance productivity, optimize the processes and operations and reduce the cost of the process. This in result decreases the cost of the overall product, increase the company’s capital profit and increase the customer satisfaction. Consequently, the areas of applications include: Accounting – cash flow planning, credit policies, planning of delinquent accounting system; Construction – allocation of resources to projects, determination of proper crew size, maintenance crew scheduling and project scheduling; Facilities planning – factory size and location, hospital panning, international logistics system; Marketing – advertising allocation, product introduction timing, selection of product mix; distribution channels; Military – general logistics and supply; simulation; trajectory etc. Forecasting – profit, sales volume, market shares, brand switching, production output, etc.; among various others too numerous to list here.

Furthermore, they are devoid of personal opinions or judgment. These massive range of the subjects and departments of any major service and manufacturing industry shows that how much critical QM (Quantitative Methods) for the modern industries and its importance to optimize it is inevitable. Scientific methods have been man’s outstanding asset to pursue an ample number of activities. The historical development will facilitate in managerial decision-making & resource allocation, The methodology helps us in studying the scientific methods with respect to phenomenon connected with human behavior like formulating the problem, defining decision variable and constraints, developing a suitable model, acquiring the input data, solving the model, validating the model, implementing the results. The major advantage of mathematical model is that it facilitates in taking decision faster and more accurately. Managerial activities have become complex and it is necessary to make right decisions to avoid heavy losses. Whether it is a manufacturing unit, or a service organization, the resources have to be utilized to its maximum in an efficient manner. The future is clouded with uncertainty and fast changing, and decision-making of a crucial activity cannot be made on a trial-and-error basis or by using a thumb rule approach.

In such situations, there is a greater need for applying scientific methods to decision-making to increase the probability of coming up with good decisions. Quantitative Technique is a scientific approach to managerial decision-making. The successful use of Quantitative methods for management would help the organization in solving complex problems on time, with greater accuracy and in the most economical way. Today, several scientific management techniques are available to solve managerial problems and use of these techniques helps managers become explicit about their objectives and provides additional information to select an optimal decision.

In Quantitative approaches, past data is used in determining decisions that would prove most valuable in the future. The use of past data in a systematic manner and constructing it into a suitable model for future use comprises a major part of scientific management. In order to understand the working of the quantitative methods consider the example of a person investing in fixed deposit in a bank, or in shares of a company, or mutual funds, or in Life Insurance Corporation. The expected return on investments will vary depending upon the interest and time period. We can use the scientific management analysis to find out how much the investments made will be worth in the future. There are many scientific method software packages that have been developed to determine and analyze the problems.

In case of complete non-availability of past data, quantitative factors are considered in decision-making. In cases where the scope of quantitative data is limited, qualitative factors play a major role in making decisions. Qualitative factors are important situations like sudden change in tax-structures, or the introduction of breakthrough technologies. Application of scientific management and Analysis is more appropriate when there is not much of variation in problems due to external factors, and where input values are steady. In such cases, a model can be developed to suit the problem which helps us to take decisions faster. In today's complex and competitive global marketplace, use of quantitative Techniques with support of qualitative factors is necessary.

Variables and or outcome cannot be known with certainty, the probability of each variable or outcome may be determined to aid decision and decision process. Probability theory, an aspect of quantitative techniques which are the chance of an uncertain event happening can be learned and applied in business. It is common knowledge that any attempt made to reduce the level of uncertainty in decision making process will to a large extent increase the chances of intelligent and well-informed decision. Since there is considerable uncertainty in decision making, it is important all the known risk involved be scientifically evaluated. The implication is that decision and outcome should not be left to chance where information or data are available, a secure approach should be so scientifically analyze them. This presupposes a procedural approach which leads itself to replication. Therefore successful business decision rely on quantitative method to narrow possibilities and help predict what options will have the greatest chance of success. Quantitative Technique is the scientific way to managerial decision-making, while emotion and guess work are not part of the scientific management approach. This approach starts with data. Like raw material for a factory, this data is manipulated or processed into information that is valuable to people making decision. This processing and manipulating of raw data into meaningful information is the heart of scientific management analysis. In the Figure below the common Quantitative Methods working mechanism is shown.

1. This is how it works as a first step, it is necessary to clearly understand the problem situations. It is important to know how it is characterized and what is required to be determined. Firstly, the key decision and the objective of the problem must be identified from the problem.
2. Then, the number of decision variables and the relationship between variables must be determined. In a given problem situation, defining the key decision variables are important. Identifying these variables helps us to develop the model.
3. A model is a mathematical representation of a problem situation. The mathematical model is in the form of expressions and equations that replicate the problem.
4. Accurate data for input values are essential. Even though the model is well constructed, it is important that the input data is correct to get accurate results. Inaccurate data will lead to wrong decisions.
5. Solving is trying for the best result by manipulating the model to the problem. This is done by checking every equation and its diverse courses of action. A trial and error method can be used to solve the model that enables us to find good solutions to the problem.
6. A validation is a complete test of the model to confirm that it provides an accurate representation of the real problem. This helps us in determining how good and realistic the solution is. During the model validation process, inaccuracies can be rectified by taking corrective actions, until the model is found to be fit.
7. Once the model is tested and validated, it is ready for implementation. Implementation involves translation/application of solution in the company. Close administration and monitoring is required after the solution is implemented, in order to address any proposed changes that call for modification, under actual working conditions.

Professional Conduct

In my opinion, good manners is something you start learning from your family in the early childhood and you never stop improving. Respecting others and being polite even to people you do not interact with, is a sign of culture and quality of character. From the first day at Henkel, I tried my best to adapt to the environment of the company, in terms of conduct and dress code. I was kind to everyone, even when I did not have to introduce myself, while keeping it to a professional level. I have to admit that everyone welcomed me warmly and made me feel comfortable from the first minute. Besides my supervisor and the colleagues that we share the same space with, on my first day I met the director of HR, and the Head of Supply Chain. They all welcomed me in person, wished me good luck and showed their support. I have already recognized the solid structure and ethics of the company from lower level employees to the upper management. My first impressions say that the company has a family like feeling among the employees of the same level, but that does not mean that it loses its organizational bonds or affects the effectiveness and productivity.

Overall I have faced a satisfactory environment to work in, which combines the experience of the older employees with the pioneering and fresh nature of the younger ones. I am convinced to keep my polite and professional conduct till the end of this internship, and I hope and believe to confirm my first impressions regarding the company.