Hej!! It is already my 5th week of my internship here in Stockholm and I’ve really enjoyed getting to further my work here and get some new assignments to work on. So far I’ve completed researching and sourcing suppliers for multiple different things the company needs. My focuses’ have been on the tableware and clothing aspects of the business. I’ve never done sourcing before but I feel I’ve gained some critical knowledge and experience in the supply chain industry so far. I’ve also been assigned with creating a guideline for general managers when making purchases from outside suppliers which really helped me understand how sourcing is done in the first place. I am now shifting my focus into learning and fixing some aspects of their scheduling system. I have already took a look at how some of their purchasing and analytics systems works so this technical insight can also prove to be super useful for me!
As far as soft and hard skills I’ve gained throughout the internship I feel as if so far I’ve really gotten to learn and observe the work culture here in Sweden and really understand how an office functions here. As well as hearing from my friends in the program who also work in offices who have confirmed some of my observations to be true for them as well. As far as soft skills, I think the most important soft skill I’ve gained so far is improving communication with colleagues and specifically my supervisor. In the beginning of the internship my office was full and pretty much everyone worked there but in July most people go on holiday in Sweden and the offices clear out. At this point I am the only one consistently working in the office here although people do come in here and there. Communication and clarification is super important to me to make sure I am on the right track with what work I’m supposed to be doing. My supervisor and I communicate through google chat pretty much everyday. I make sure I’m on the right track and have been told to not hesitate to reach out to ask for more assignments or instruction on what to do if I have downtime. Even though she’s on holiday she has been generally very responsive and communicative with me which has really been great and I appreciate it. Another soft skill I’ve gained is adaptation (obviously) to not only a European work environment, but also a professional environment as well. I’ve never worked in an office before let alone with such high ranking experienced professionals so I really have had to adapt to figure out what the culture in the office is here. As I’ve talked about in some of my blog posts I have found that heavy and sole focus on work eliminating distractions is key to my colleagues day to days here and also how they get their work done in a timely manner. Most of my colleagues are in the office from 10-4 and people leave earlier than the typical “9-5” in the US. I have adapted and done my best to eliminate the distraction of my phone here at work so that my sole focus is on my assignments. I have found that this is really helpful to productivity and really helps me to clear my head to solely focus on work. Also adapting to cultural work traditions here has been a pleasure. Learning about the importance of things like Fika here in Sweden have been really pleasant surprises. Fika is a break pretty much, it is when all of the colleagues sit down together, get their mind off of work briefly and enjoy a snack together. I’ve observed this is key to bonding and really would like to bring some form of this to the US as I think an intentional distraction of a snack with colleagues is so much better than an accidental impulsive twitter scroll which completely sidetracks your productivity.
As far as hard skills I’ve gained in this internship so far I think the most valuable is learning about sourcing suppliers which has been a large portion of the work I’ve done here at Boulebar so far. I had to do independent research in the beginning to learn how exactly you go about finding suppliers for the specific things I was looking for (in my case tableware and clothing) and once I thought I had a good idea I was able to find many viable options for the company to look at and hopefully make a decision on which they can change to in the future. Another hard skill I’ve gained here is learning about many of the different systems Boulebar uses to operate. So far I’ve spent a lot of time navigating and learning how two of their systems work but my newest assignment focuses on making changes to their scheduling system so I will also get insight on how to make changes to the system as well. The first system I looked at was where they made purchases for food and beverage. I was able to observe and analyse KPIs of the food and beverage sales in the restaurants as well as look at waste and see which products were being used optimally as well as the ones that were not being used in the respects they should be. This system also gave sales projections for products as well as the best selling product information which was really interesting to see. The other system I got to take a deep dive into was their NPS and cost system. It was pretty much a report of the company and gave me insight into the staffing costs as well as the profit margins for the daily operations of the company. This system also included NPS (net promoter score) comments for the company where people who visit the restaurant fill out a form reviewing and rating their experience at the restaurant. It was great to read and see all of the reviews of the different restaurants (good and bad) and see what were some common complaints with the restaurants.
I also wanted to briefly talk about my weekend in Olso, my family visited many of the Nordic countries last week and visited me in Stockholm, they got to see the city and even have dinner at Boulebar one of their nights here which they loved. After their few days in Stockholm we all went to Oslo and got to see Norways capital city! It was great to venture outside of Sweden after a month of being here and getting to see another major city was really a delight! Oslo was very similar operationally yet had such a different vibe and atmosphere giving a much grittier and different take on a nordic city. I really enjoyed the smell of the ocean and getting to see the distant fjords was really beautiful. We had many nice dinners and even got to enjoy a bike ride around the city before I came back to Stockholm to resume work and they returned back to the states. Overall it was a great weekend and a great experience to see a different country!
