Technology and Management Consulting Intern
During the summer of 2018, I interned as a technology and management consultant for Oracle’s ERP system, NetSuite at RSM in Philadelphia. RSM is the fifth largest tax, audit, and consulting firm, in the US that specializes in providing support for middle market companies. Along with its work here in the USA, RSM also has partner offices globally. RSM defines middle market companies as those who generate revenue can be between $10 and $500 million. To serve that middle market, RSM a couple years ago, created the company vision to become the first-choice advisor to middle market leaders globally. This vision is one that is engrained in the company culture.
Part of my role as a NetSuite consultant was to assist clients with implementing and supporting the NetSuite application. Most of the implementation was simple configuration, but some clients required customization, that’s where a lot of my time was assigned. Customizations involve a lot of testing to ensure that they do not cause errors in the companies’ business process and/or the businesses’ general ledger.
A new client for my team reported about 80 issues with their UI in NetSuite and some issues with the implementation. Where I was able to assist was with the UI errors. Fixing UI in Netsuite is considered “easy” by everyone on my team, but for me, it was a challenge since this is my first time ever seeing NetSuite. So I took this opportunity to get familiar with NetSuite and attempted solve as many issues as possible. My work for this client allowed the other consultants to tackled the more complex issues, and I was able to provide great value for the client and my team.
Another task that I completed was importing data for a client’s new subsidiary. I had to ensure the data was clean, then correctly map the columns to the fields in NetSuite. I accomplished this in a sandbox environment and had to take notes about the problems that arose. The notes will help ensure that when the data is imported into production it can be imported correctly and without any hiccups. After testing the import I was allowed to lead a call with the client, explaining where to find the data in NetSuite, as well as export it to validate the accuracy of my work.
This internship was my first experience with the consulting style of work. What I learned was to always keep track of my time, because when pay period came up I was responsible for documenting what I was doing, and for how long. Another thing I learned was how to become a better virtual communicator. A lot of the time my team were at client sites, or in other offices so all communication had to be done virtually. This required me to be efficient with my words, and ask the right questions so I could complete my tasks.
The knowledge from my Fox coursework that I applied for my internship was accounting/financial knowledge, data collection/structuring. NetSuite at its core is a powerful piece of accounting software, and coming into this internship I was not aware of that and throughout my work, I had to recall a lot of the things I practiced in my classes in order to understand what I was doing in my daily tasks. Assisting with my daily tasks was my understanding of data that I was taught in all MIS classes. This helped to be efficient in creating reports, importing data into NetSuite, as well as configuring how the data is linked.