My last blogposts have been a lot about how great it is to be a trainee and how much I learn at every new department. But what do I actually do every day? Here comes a summary of the previous week which I spent in the Purchasing department.

Monday

Telephone conference with the other sites about our ongoing CSR work. CSR stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. Issues included in CSR is for example how we can work in an environmentally friendly way, how we take care of our staff in a good way and that we do business in a fair way.

Tuesday

Ate cake. Our new recombinant product got FDA approval. This means that the product is approved for the American market, which of course is a big deal. To highlight the great work that a lot of our employees has put in to make this possible we all celebrated with cake.

Celebrating with cake

Wednesday

Project meeting. There are a lot of different projects going on at the site which involves people from different departments. Depending on which department I’m in I get to join some of these projects and follow the progress for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I get to join the same project again later on and see it from another department’s point of view.

Thursday

Follow-up meeting regarding department goals. All departments set goals for each year which should reflect on the corporate goals. From time to time we have meetings to follow up on how we are doing and what else we need to do to reach our goals.

Friday

Putting numbers into columns. In the middle of the week I emailed a form to a number of our suppliers and then these data had to be collected and questions from the suppliers had to be answered.

Other activities included this week was: answering emails, attending meetings, googling stuff, writing emails, mingling by the coffee machine, setting up meetings, trying to get hold of people I had questions for, emailing some more, using excel, googling how to do what I was trying to do in excel, getting hold of some of the people I had questions for, reading a lot of literature on purchasing, writing even more emails and attending some more meetings.