The end of my internship
The coming Tuesday will mark the end of my L'Oreal HK internship. With June being the last month of Hong Kong's academic year, a lot of fresh grads and new hires have arrived in the office. Thus, they have no room, and no budget, to have an intern around doing the menial tasks :p
But it was a fun month :) and I must say I did learn a lot. Some of the things that I have accomplished:
- Created the "Matrix Information Library". Everyone in the Matrix team had so many CDs, DVDs, VHS, floppy disks, etc that contained all the marketing information, pictures, press releases, videos, etc and it was becoming quite difficult to look for the file that you need. So what I did was to go through all the items, encode it to an excel file, and make descriptive tags for it. After labeling, we cleared out a cabinet and plopped everything there so that people just had to access the excel file to know exactly where to look to get a specific file. Hopefully they'll be responsible enough to put the stuff back in the proper shelves :)
- Salon surveys. It was fun going around the Hong Kong salons, especially since I didnt know the language. For some, I had to fake that I was a foreign visitor that wanted some highlights. For others, I simply introduced myself as someone from L'Oreal. The second method obviously worked better for obtaining information such as competitor's market share in the store. In a span of 5 days, I visited a total of 137 salons from Causeway Bay, to Mong Kok, to the new territories of Sha Tin and Ma On Sha. And my French General Manager also appreciated the fact that we now had photos of these salons, from the logos, to the prices, to the interiors :)
- Sales Analysis. This was really tedious. I had to make one giant worksheet containing all the sales per brand per salon per month. And worse of all was that the data had to be taken from two different systems; the salon and product codes were different from each other. It took me a week to figure which was which. I think I need new glasses after spending two weeks just typing and looking at numbers.
- Direct Mailing. Hahaha, the stereotypical intern chore - to print out letters, insert an invitation card to an event, print out the recipient's name and address on the label, seal the envelope, and mail it. It's not so bad, but having to make 1000 of these mails was really really tedious.
Well, that's it :) Nothing too groundbreaking, but this month has been an experience worth having. I start my work back in L'Oreal Philippines on December 1. I still dont know where I will be assigned, but I hope I'll be able to do something that will challenge my brain more :)
When the new employees arrived, they took the little space I had. So management decided to place me in the unoccupied executive room of the Asia Zone Director. Hehehe, not bad for an intern :p
But it was a fun month :) and I must say I did learn a lot. Some of the things that I have accomplished:
- Created the "Matrix Information Library". Everyone in the Matrix team had so many CDs, DVDs, VHS, floppy disks, etc that contained all the marketing information, pictures, press releases, videos, etc and it was becoming quite difficult to look for the file that you need. So what I did was to go through all the items, encode it to an excel file, and make descriptive tags for it. After labeling, we cleared out a cabinet and plopped everything there so that people just had to access the excel file to know exactly where to look to get a specific file. Hopefully they'll be responsible enough to put the stuff back in the proper shelves :)
- Salon surveys. It was fun going around the Hong Kong salons, especially since I didnt know the language. For some, I had to fake that I was a foreign visitor that wanted some highlights. For others, I simply introduced myself as someone from L'Oreal. The second method obviously worked better for obtaining information such as competitor's market share in the store. In a span of 5 days, I visited a total of 137 salons from Causeway Bay, to Mong Kok, to the new territories of Sha Tin and Ma On Sha. And my French General Manager also appreciated the fact that we now had photos of these salons, from the logos, to the prices, to the interiors :)
- Sales Analysis. This was really tedious. I had to make one giant worksheet containing all the sales per brand per salon per month. And worse of all was that the data had to be taken from two different systems; the salon and product codes were different from each other. It took me a week to figure which was which. I think I need new glasses after spending two weeks just typing and looking at numbers.
- Direct Mailing. Hahaha, the stereotypical intern chore - to print out letters, insert an invitation card to an event, print out the recipient's name and address on the label, seal the envelope, and mail it. It's not so bad, but having to make 1000 of these mails was really really tedious.
Well, that's it :) Nothing too groundbreaking, but this month has been an experience worth having. I start my work back in L'Oreal Philippines on December 1. I still dont know where I will be assigned, but I hope I'll be able to do something that will challenge my brain more :)
When the new employees arrived, they took the little space I had. So management decided to place me in the unoccupied executive room of the Asia Zone Director. Hehehe, not bad for an intern :p