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Hello Everyone! I’m Dhruv Patwa, a final year Undergraduate student in Chemical Engineering at IIT Bombay. I interned at the Ahmedabad site of Piramal Pharma Solutions. This site of Piramal is dedicated to providing drug discovery services to large pharmaceutical companies. We were fortunate to get a chance to visit the site and work as it was an in person internship. My work involved immense discussions and collaborations with the people on the site, which couldn’t have been smooth had we been working virtually. I could also see the implementation of my project right in the warehouse, which is definitely an experience one waits for :). However, shifting and living in a new city throws some challenges. Most of the people at site were very used to interacting in Gujarati only, so willingly or unwillingly, I could learn to interpret some Gujarati by the end of the internship (If you want to call it a perk :D).
I was working in the supply chain management division of the site. The projects I worked on were very independent and I had the freedom to decide the exact deliverables and also the problem statement. So, the initial part of my internship was just interviewing the different stakeholders to spot the gaps and define the problem statements. My projects were related to inventory management and automation in the supply chain. I was really motivated and satisfied with the projects and the support company provided me at all points of the project right from identification of gaps, collection of data, and till the actual implementation of projects at the site.
However, some of the other interns at site were allotted work in the research labs, where they had to perform actual experiments, while interns at some of the manufacturing sites had actual chemical engineering based projects. The level of freedom and time commitment was also varying a lot across different projects. I usually had to work over time especially towards the end of internship as the projects involved a lot of work while implementing them and setting them running at the site.
Piramal hires its interns under a program called ‘Global Emerging Leaders’ internship program (GEL). They try to staff the GEL interns on high business impact projects which is very different from the usual employees at plants, who only have their day-to-day work to do. They had allotted mentors and managers to us, but for my case their role was limited to providing me with the direction as to what is feasible/useful to implement in the plant and what’s not. Rest almost everything was up to me including the exact idea of project deliverable, the means of executing it and implementing it in the plant. However, it involved immense collaboration with the people at site. They had the arrangement of lunch, breakfast as well as evening snacks for us at the site.
The broad goals of my projects were to implement automated systems in the supply chain to reduce the manual work, improve efficiencies of procedures as well as to reduce the errors caused due to manual work. Also one of the projects was related to inventory management at site, so that would cause a huge saving in terms of inventory holding and ordering costs of materials.
Due to the non-core nature of my internship, it didn’t involve the application of any chemical engineering course as such, but I could experience the application of a course in Operations Analysis of IEOR department that I did in my 5th semester. Further, this experience made me confident about my interest in the field of supply chain and operations management, and motivated me to explore these in future as well.