Merck Internship – Summer 2015
Emerging Talent Internship Overview – Animal Health Supply Chain
As part of the Emerging Talent Program, I was placed in the Animal Health department at Merck in Upper Gwynedd, PA. My main role was to extend the capabilities of FusionOps, a cloud-based supply chain analytics platform that the department adopted within the last two years. In the process, I was to expand my project management and data analytics capabilities as a member of the program team. The overall goal of the initiative is/was to reduce inventory and substantially increase productivity/efficiency.
Roles and Responsibilities
Throughout the internship, I floated in and out of multiple work-streams assisting with many small projects that contributed to the whole. Some of these included the creation of new metric methodology (critical thinking regarding how to combine two separate metrics from different production sites in to a single metric), general data validation between SAP and FusionOps (in order to make sure that data is being pulled efficiently and correctly from SAP in to FusionOps), the design and organization of an Order Fulfillment dashboard (used to gauge performance in the order fulfillment process) and a Product Cockpit dashboard (used to gauge performance of individual products at a high level), and the “clean-up” of master data (making sure data remains consistent across production sites).
My “major” deliverable was the complete end-to-end creation of a Transportation/Logistics dashboard from basic data structuring and report building/methodology all the way through design and visualization. (This differs from the above mentioned Order Fulfillment dash as I did not work on that end-to-end.) At the highest level, this dashboard analyzes the performance of all production sites based on whether or not the correct modes of transportation are being used to move products and how well their transportation lead-times compare to set standards. However, the data can be filtered down to specific sites, by species group, and if needed: all the way down to the order level. This gives the users of the dashboard the ability to not only monitor Transportation/Logistics performance at a glance, but to be able to analyze and “fix” problem areas through data drill-downs and intuitive analysis.
Reactions
The experience as a whole was wonderful, mostly due to the overwhelming support of my colleagues and leadership team. I was constantly challenged while simultaneously being given a lot of freedom regarding how I wanted to approach my work. I believe this allowed me to more effectively grow as an employee, particularly given the fact that this was my first internship. I also felt that I was able to consistently make a real positive impact on my team. In other words, my input held weight in decision making and my project contributions left an actual mark. I’m hoping to return as a full-time employee in the Emerging Talent Rotational program next year, but am also looking to stay on my current team part-time until then.