Once again in a magazine

Hi!

The text below was written for an organisation called ESTIEM but it tells you quite a bit of my work down here at Oerlikon Solar. Don't forget the comment field after you've read! :-)

If somebody would have told me that I 3 hours into my internship at Oerlikon Solar would start drawing up supplier selection strategies for one of their more advanced machines I would have just laughed. I had always heard that interns get to start slowly with the mundane tasks like doing research on the internet, prepare PowerPoint slides and crunch numbers in Excel. Nevertheless that is how my internship at the Supply Chain Management office at Oerlikon Solar started.

But maybe I should start from the beginning. Sadly enough I have

not been super-active in ESTIEM. I have helped arranging a TIMES semi-final with my LG (Linköping), participated in TIMES (in Grenoble) and I participated in the ESTIEM Summer Academy in 2007 with teacher Jim Platts (something I very much can recommend by the way). I have however been a subscriber to the ESTIEM Newsletter since maybe 2005 and when I got the internship ad for “Global Benchmarking” at Oerlikon Solar it was too tempting not to apply. Simplified, Oerlikon Solar sells solar panel factories. The daughter company of Oerlikon OC does its own research on the thin film solar panels and develops the key machines in the solar panel factories. Oerlikon Solar sells the factories “turn-key”, meaning it also takes responsibility for that the factories have a certain capacity before they

“hand over the keys to the factory”. The starting price for a factory being around a 100 millon USD it is quite obvious that the economic crises have struck the company hard. Money for investments is hard to find these days. The financial hardship also threatened my internship but after having spent a couple of week in the frustrating

situation of having won the application process and still maybe not getting the chance to work, I could pack my bags and head down to Switzerland.

After a couple of days in the office I quickly noticed there was something special about Oerlikon Solar, or at least the people working there. Despite being in the country side right next to Liechtenstein, a 100km from Zürich the people working there come from literally all over the world. I have met people from France (both continental France and La Réunion), Austalia, Japan, South America, Jordan, India and

Norway. Most of the people are of course still from Switzerland, Austria and Germany but the atmosphere is very international and very open. My second week there I got invited to the “Trainee house” (yes you guessed right, it iss were the visiting Oerlikon trainees live) for beer and barbeque offered on the house.

I have studied Supply Chain Management and Purchasing and it has been great to discover I could make use of some of what I have learnt at university, during my internship. Despite the economic downturn the buyers in S theCM office are quite busy with the day to day tasks. My job has often been to put the extra hours into tasks that they have not had time for. So far I have worked with linking the strategic goals of Oerlikon Solar with a specific supplier selection strategy. When I write this I am working with two SAP tools that are used for supplier rating and supplier benchmarking respectively. In addition, I am also looking into risk management connected to Oerlikon Solar’s suppliers. All in all, I have been fortunate enough to work with many of the key fields in SCM and on a quite strategic level. I would recommend anyone interested in a future career in SCM/Purchasing to do an internship at Oerlikon Solar.

Going up the Country

Mels and the Sargans area is excellent for hiking and biking. I did a bike tour when I just came here and let's just say it was quite tiresome.

But well a the top I was rewarded with a nice little waterfall which made me really happy.

On the way down I had close encounter with local fauna!

All in all it was a great evening. I love being able to go up the mountain whenever the weather is nice.

Life here is good I must say. See you!

Mystery in the Making?

Who is the strange man? What is he looking at? Why is there a name on the house? What is painted on the wall above the entrance? This and much more will follow in a later post.

I had my first day at work today. I must say it's quite interesting to start working on a strategy for supplier selection of very complex machine after having spent about 3 hours on site. :)

For my fellow Industrial Engineers:
Am I working in Powerpoint? Yes! Am I writing action headlines? You betcha! Am I doing nice charts with lots of colours? Not yet, BUT! I have applied the company presentation template.

Damn it feels good to be a PowerPoint Engineer!

Short Intermission (mellanspel)

Hej och hallå!

I'm doing well and Switzerland has been good to me so far. I will tell you more about all this but until then I would like to tell you that the Milka cow is actually Austrian and nothing else.

Thomas, my house mate, pointed out this.

I'm going to show you some films from time to time about my life here. It's quicker and more fun than writing I figured. Here's one from the first day.

During the last days we've been preparing the house. We've bought tonnes and tonnes of stuff and now I'm sitting in the sofa looking out the window up on the mountains. Tomorrow is the first work day!

See you soon!

/e

Land of Mountain Cows, Chocolate and Cows Made of Chocolate

Hello everyone.

This is going to be a quite short post. I'm thinking that if I don't write super long messages I might actually be able to update this blog more frequently.

Sooooooooo...

I'm going to Switzerland to do an internship (praktik) at a company called Oerlikon Solar. This might not be news to some people who follow me on facebook or twitter but it might be news that I during 3 weeks weren't sure if I would finally be able to do the internship since the original project I was supposed to do seemed to be cancelled for a while. It's back on track anyway and I leave from Bonn with the train on Wednesday. There's actually a direct train going all the way to Sargans where I'll live.

Visa större karta

Sargan's situated in the Rhein valley and is very close to Liechtenstein. I'll live in a house with some other people but I'll get back to you on that.

All in all I'm super excited about this internship that's gonna last for about 4 months.

More details to come. Write me a line now why don't you?

Take care!

/erik

Cool bike.

I think I need to get one of these...

Studentlivet är hårt...

Den här är utsikten från mitt fönster just nu... Synd att jag inte fick sen den brinna. Det var nog stämningsfullt.