Colgate's Supply Chain Internship Update

Around 2 months ago I had the fantastic opportunity of starting my internship with Colgate’s Supply Chain team here in Rogers, AR. The whole office has been extremely welcoming, and it has been very comfortable getting used to the atmosphere. We have multiple office events, some including after work ice cream socials, June Live Better Month, and we are even about to start our Office Olympics. June Live Better Month was an event put on by our office to encourage employees to live a healthy lifestyle and stay active. Simple things like this have made it significantly easier to socialize and ask for help from just about anyone in the office.

Our team’s only customer is Walmart, and it has truly been amazing to see the amount of effort and flexibility it takes to work with such a company. Being such a large company there are obviously a lot of different routes, products, and issues surrounding all of that which my team gets to handle. The majority of my job has been to create, pull, and analyze reports that cover a number of different aspects of our supply chain. I get the opportunity to handle metrics surrounding OTIF, instocks, inventory, and many other things for Colgate products making it to the Walmart shelves. I have also gotten to handle issues surrounding our “problem freight” which is a mis-shipment of a PO to one of the Distribution Centers. This could entail many different issues, but I am tasked with identifying the issue, putting it into our system, and deciding whether or not we want it returned or donated/destroyed. Which is all based on how much money it costs Colgate for that PO to be lost.

This week my team is currently working on our Quarterly Business Review for this 2nd quarter. The other Intern and I were tasked with updating the numbers for our overall averages for the quarter as well as updating KPI graphs to make them more professional and easier to analyze.

Specific things we updated:

• OTIF(On Time and In Full)
• Product Cuts
• Compliance Charges
• Demand Planning
• Supply Chain Goals
• Tom’s of Maine KPIs

Current Project

We were also given our first projects this week as interns. Walmart is currently working on fully integrating RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) technology within all of their stores. This will essentially allow them to track every item that enters and exits the store. So, my project I have been tasked with is to see what it will take to implement and how much it will cost Colgate-Palmolive to fully integrate this technology within the packaging of all of our products sold in Walmart stores. I have started on my research and it really is impressive technology, but there are definitely some privacy issues with the ability to track purchased products once they have left the store. My next objective with this project is to contact Auburn University, which Walmart is working with to integrate this new technology. Auburn University has an RFID Lab where they have created ARC, a test system and database that stores data of in-development and in-market RFID tags

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Final Thoughts

Though I might have run into a few hiccups in the first couple weeks with the onboarding process, my knowledge with certain programs, analyzing certain metrics, and working as a team has already grown substantially. It is so nice finally being able to apply certain Supply Chain concepts I have learned at the University of Arkansas within my actual place of work. I am so excited to continue to work and grow with this amazing team for such an amazing company!