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.

Twitter is retarded

Heres the proof:

Fantastisk film!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Tack för tipset Johannes!

Inte är jag journalist men...

...snart kommer jag finnas i tryck med en artikel om Grenoble. Mer här:

Toulouse

I'm going to Toulouse with Verena and Daniel over the week-end to see two friends from the third year of my French school that are writing there graduation thesis (exjobb) at Airbus. I'm very much looking forward to it. Afterwards it's two final weeks in Grenoble with exams (first one on wednesday) and hopefully some parties. Then I and Verena will go by bus to Barcelona and afterwards to Düsseldorf with Ryan Air. Then Sweden in the middle of July. Looking forward to seeing you soon!

And oh... This is fun.

Not really a post buuuuuut...

...I wanted to add a video to the blog which I think is kind of cool. I haven't decided if it's good yet.



Latest plans are going to Barcelona with Verena and thereafter fly to Düsseldorf. After that I'll return to Sweden for a while before returning to Karlsruhe for a two-week seminar in the Schwarzwald forest. Thereafter it's back to studying in Linköping.

See you!

Happiness is a warm kofta

Hejhej everybody!

Know it's been ages since I last wrote but you know how it is: Sometimes you feel like writing, sometimes you don't. Last time I wrote was before my birthday so I think I'll write a little something about that to bring you up to speed. Since then there has also been the campaign, as some of you have seen in the email I sent, otherwise look at the link here, I've been to Geneva and I've also done a small internship. The latter was a real time consumer. More about that later, maybe...

Yes, sorry. Maybe I should have mentioned that you need to have a quite good knowledge of Beatles songs, Indian cuisine and speak Swedish to understand the title of the blog, but I'm sure Oskar and my dad will think it's somewhat funny.

(Did you follow all the three links, and thereafter pondered on my little wordplay there? I guess I just waisted a minute of your life that you'll never have back :-)

Anyways... I had played with the idea of celebrating my birthday at an Indian restaurant with the friends that would feel like going. The reason I chose Indian is because it's one my favorites and because I've happened to stumble upon a really nice and not particularly pricey restaurant close to my school. To make a long story short, I had originally booked between 20 and 25 seats since I thought that there actually might be quite a few people motivated to come. Finally, we ended up being more than 40 persons and took up the entire bottom floor of the restaurant! I should think the owner was happy, since it was a Thursday... It's truly a gift to have the opportunity to have so many friends to gather around you. I surely hope I can stay in touch with some of them. To the ones who were there, thank you! I wish you could all could come to Linköping next year for my 25th birthday!

Birthday Indian Style

Now it's time to go eat in the school K'fet. It's the "Art Club" that has arranged a week of different "arty" things. For example, I took a gospel introductory lesson yesterday. Twelve students and man with a piano. He could truly sing well and we weren't too bad either! We sang classics like "when the saints" and "Oh happy day". Way fun! Maybe it's time to be doing something with my ideas of joining a choir...

Pictures of Geneva are already on my Picasa page and there well be more soon.

See you soon I hope! (only three months left here at school).

/erik

More pictures!

Click the image to look at the latest pictures from my snowboarding trips. (No, I don't feel the least bit sorry for myself)

Mountain Pictures

Let it Snow

This Friday I was climbing the Bastille and I could have easily worn just a T-shirt, it was literally that warm. Now, however, it's below freezing outside and the snow is falling in the moutains as well as in Grenoble (the photo is taken from my window). I feel a little bad for the poor suckers who are not into wintersports (yes, they DO exist) since everyone else is talking snow, snow, snow and the next time they're going skiing or snowboarding. Speaking of which, I can't wait to go out and hit that fresh snow with my board. I have, however, found another passion in telemark. It's really fun to swosh down the moutain with telemark turns, and very different from snowboarding. It's difficult though and it's a killer for your legs the day after. I liked very much being on skis in a slope again and I'm sure I'll do it more this season.

Down to the right you'll see a music chart. It's a list of my favourite artists at the moment and it's updated every week (facebook users will need to go look on the blog page). Click it to find even more listening statistics.

Thank You

In December I printed out a lot of photos, old as as well as from my time here in Grenoble. I was actually inspired by the little brother of a friend of mine in Versaille. He had put pictures of his friends and himself in a large and creative collage on one of his walls (His room is still the coolest boy room I've seen to this day). Today, I spent some time putting my printed digital pictures up on a wall to do my own version. I didn't dare to cut in them but I'm still very satisfied with the result, which you can see below. I'm only missing pictures on some of my relatives, så om ni kan skicka lite bilder kära släktingar, gärna i relativt höga upplösningar till min Gmail-adress, på er, era barn eller bilder där jag och ni är med tillsammans, så skulle jag bli jätteglad. Tack på förhand.

I've uploaded in high resolution so if you're curious about the pictures. Just click.

Looking at all my friends and relative makes me really thankful for all the good memories I've had with you all: Berlin with Johannes and Kate, walking in the mountains with mum, skiing at Grövelsjön with dad and Eva, Hamburg with Johanna, meeting my brother Mårten and his family on Gotland when I was there with the navy, having hot wine in Lyon with Tilly (and a lot of other people that we're not on the photo), partying with Sarah, Ylva, J-B (Jean-Baptiste), Katharina and Louis, being invited to eat with our peer students in Grenoble, seeing Thomas take a dump(!) through the mobile home's toilet window during our integration weekend with my school here, Martinas cute smile a warm day at Linköping University, crazy photos with Daniel, walking in Paris with Ann-So, Martin and the others, Elisabeth and Jesper on the almost legendary Gozinto evening, Verena, Karina and Johan on the Gala, Frank doing capoeira in the mountains, Kent's appreciation of Coffee, the equally cute smile of Katie an evening at Johanna in Haninge, it goes on and on... THANK YOU for all these memories. Let's go make some more some time soon, ok?

I realise that I haven't showed you how I live so here are some completely uncensored pictures from my room. I just took them and the sun has already set but the room is actually always quite dark due to the fact that the only window is facing the courtyard of the house.

My window is the lover to the left, over the garage, where I also enter. No pictures of the garage today, sorry.


My stairs.


My bed and sofa. I hated the colours first but they actually go well with the wooden tones in the furniture. Before I changed the pictures in the frames today, I had a really boring flower and an almost as boring cactus.


My little kitchen, bathroom entrance and the new collage.The poster is a motive drawn by one of my favourite sculptors, Giacometti. It was here when I came, talk about happy coincidence!


The window. Can you see how thick the walls are?


Detail on the bathroom. It's really well-renovated. However, the flush button is broken and my landlord think I'm the culprit ("gärningsman" [translated words are words that I myself are not sure on, so please don't be offended, dear reader]) when it was actually broken when I got here. He wrote me a quite aggravated letter a couple of days ago (He was probably more angry about the floor that I had scratched, only using his furniture...) I need to write him back to explain that and other issues that have come up. That's gonna be a bit of drag...


View from an another angle on my table and the stairs.



Finally. My favourite radio station has played "I'm from Barcelona" with We're from Barcelona three times this afternoon. Is the Swedish giant group (25+ members) gonna have a hit in France? Hmmm... Strange.

Where's the Snow?

Johannes, a friend who's in Canada at the moment, has asked me to update my blog (he told actually) and since I like to obey.... This is actually going to be too short to a real blog entry since I need to sleep badly.

I spent my new years in Paris with friends from Grenoble. It was nice but I missed real fire-works (it was too windy). Twas nice to hear the pops froms multiple Champagne corks when the clock struck midnight though.

After that, I've gone snowboarding a couple of times. This one station around Grenoble, 2 Alpes, is quite nice, and maybe Alpe d'Huez as well. The latter I've yet to visit though. Other than that it's a bad year for winter sports with almost no snow in the hills. I would almost feel sad for myself If I didn't know there were real problems out there.


Zzzzzee ya!

The Mountains Revisited

Hi!

Long time no see. Sorry about that, but school was as promised a mess for a month there.

I need to go to sleep soon so this won't be too long. I just want to say that I went snowboarding this weekend for two days in Deux Alpes and it was absoluteley marvellous. Excellent snow, decent to excellent weather and of course wonderful friends to share the experience with. I have put some pictures on my Picasa picture page as well as pictures from my hike in the moutains with mum. There's not too much snow in the moutains but that just means that it's more or less Swedish conditions (not this year's Swedish conditions though).

From Deux Alpes web album

I'm coming home for Christmas the 22nd and then I leave again for Paris the 30th to celebrate New Years Eve there. School starts again the 3rd.

Take care!

Time to get to work

This coming month is going to a bit more loaded when it comes to homework. I've two group assignments. In one of them, the three of us have 30-page scientific text about car manufacturing (more precisely about optimisation, the best order to produce cars with the different features, like colour or extra equipment, on the same production line) in French which we need to understand and present by a two-page text and presentation, with questions from the teachers in the end. It IS a bit scary. The other assignment is to go out and interview a company about their innovation process and make a 15-page essay about it. We're visiting Caterpillar, the company that builds construction vehicles. This course also includes a written 2-page synthesis on another text plus a presentation of said text, about 21 hours of mandatory lectures AND a test. All this will give 1,75 ECTS which corresponds to approximately one (1!!!) Swedish högskolepoäng. To give a bit of perspective I managed to get 3 ECTS by doing an all-to-easy online French course. You had to work online a bit and then the examination was 2 half-hour tests. Do I need to add that the French are quite new with the credit system?

Despite school having its ups and downs, I still love it here. Yesterday, I had an absolutely lovely evening. I made pizza and kladdkaka with a couple of friends (and DAD, if they show up on several photos it won't necessarily mean we're dating) and after that we joined with a couple of other persons and went out dancing. We manage to find this bar with the kind of music I love I love to dance to and we stayed till closing, which sadly is two o'clock at all bars in France. If you want to continue you need to go to a boite (disco) and the one we found cost €10 (or is it 10€?, comment please). It was free for the ladies though. Makes you think what you're actually paying for...

The ones of you who have visited my photo page lately have seen that I've done some stuff I haven't really written about, like climbing outdoors. My mother asked me when she was here (guess I haven't mentioned that either) what the fun with climbing was, with the sort of tone in her voice suggesting that she personally thinks it's dangerous and unnecessary. I guess it's just the challenge of it all. Managing to do something that first looks impossible. I've already got me a pair of climbing shoes and joined the climbing school attached to the university sport system (which I've described it a bit more in the bottom of this blog entry) so now I can go climbing almost every week-day if I want to. I guess the outdoor season will soon be finished but there's always the indoor wall.

I've also gone to Paris with a couple of friends from school. It was nice.

Then my mother came here last Thursday. It was also nice.

I hope to go Nice before the end of the year here.

Ha. Ha. Ha. (I am a little bit tired today.) Paris trip and my mother's visit was possible thanks to the vacation we had last week. Write something in the comments section if your curious and wanna know more. Actually, write something anyway. It would be nice to see who's reading this text. What you think of the links, etc. See, I ain't to proud to beg...

Anyway, before I go back to trying to start doing my homework I want to give you a little treat. The window below starts a clip from a concert with Jethro Tull, a group I know absolutely nothing about. However, the song is absolutely brilliant, weird, fluteylicious>, (you'll understand when you see him play...) and generally different from whatever you usually listen to. Listen at least until the flute solo. Later he plays air guitar with it as well...

Tills nästa gång, kram till er alla! (Hugs until next time!)

Gala!

Hey you!

Since it's easier to look at images than to read I'm now supplying you with a nice web album with pictures from the "Gala" my school had this weekend. The girls were pretty, the guys were handsome and the wine was flowing. I had a really nice time.

Gala in Grenoble

Just click the photo and you'll be taken to the album. Captions (bildtexter) might be written later on. (And yes mother, the blog entry about studying will be published :-)