Internship report

By

Satikarn Gipp Limaksorn 534 33338 26

Pattapong Wirungruangkul 534 32670 26
orm

Major:
International Business

Company:
Nestle (Thai) Ltd.

Area of research:
Sales &Marketing

(07/05/13-18/06/13)
 Acknowledgement

Apart from the efforts of us, the success of any project depends
largely on the encouragement and guideline of many others. We take
this opportunity to express our gratitude to the people who have been
instrumental in the successful completion of this report.

We would like to show our greatest appreciation to Khun Worapong

Kietdumrongwong, Khun Pattramon Narknoi, Khun Vichai,Khun Amp,
our kind supervisors who had been teaching us and providing such a
nice support and guidance.

We would also like to thank to P’ont, who had been in charge of

Nestle internship program and had taken take of ourselves and helped
us when we had any problems during our time in Nestle.

Last but not least, we wouldn’t had this great opportunity without
the help and support from Khun Sirikarn Phithakthanachok. Her
willingness to her time generously has been very much appreciated.
 Table of contents
Table of contents
Acknowledgement
Company Detail
Work responsibility and assignments
Problems encountered in your assigned tasks
Knowledge gained from the work experience
Contribution of the project to the company
How has the internship expanded/broadened your business
knowledge?
General comments and suggestions for the company
Illustrations
Overview of the company

Nestlé is the world's leading Nutrition, Health and Wellness

company. Our mission of "Good Food, Good Life" is to provide
consumers with the best tasting, most nutritious choices in a wide
range of food and beverage categories and eating occasions, from
morning to night. The Company was founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé
in Vevey, Switzerland, where our headquarters are still located today.
We employ around 280 000 people and have factories or operations in
almost every country in the world. The Nestlé Corporate Business
Principles (pdf, 1 Mb) are at the basis of our company’s culture,
developed over 140 years, which reflects the ideas of fairness, honesty
and long-term thinking.

Nestlé’s ambition is to be recognized as the world leader in

Nutrition, Health and Wellness, trusted by all stakeholders. This
ambition is encapsulated in the simple phrase, “Good Food, Good Life”.
It reflects the promise we make to all stakeholders that we will
enhance the quality of people’s lives with our good food and
beverages, everywhere. We believe that by consistently delivering on
our promises, we will earn trust over a long period of time.

Nestle’s history in Thailand began on October 18th 1893, with the

first advertisement for “Milkmaid” sweetened condensed milk in the
Bangkok Times. Trading was successfully established via imports and
by 1947 a distribution company, “Pronesiam” Inc., had been set up for
all Nestle products. In 1968, in response to increasing demand for
Nestle goods in Thailand and favourable investment conditions, Nestle
took the first step towards creating a local manufacturing base.
 Today, Nestle Group Thailand has 6 plants and employs 2,800
people. Nestle produces and distributes its food & beverages products
throughout the country under such famous brand names as Nestle
BEAR BRAND, Nestle MILO, NESCAFE, Nestle COFFEE-MATE, NESVITA,
Nestle PURE LIFE, and Nestle Ice Cream and is well-known and
respected by consumers for its high quality products. Nestle’s
involvement in Thailand is not limited simply to producing a wide range
of food & beverages products. It is also committed to fostering
economic and social development, to instigating and promoting
environmental programmes, to implementing crop improvement
schemes for local farmers, and to achieving self-sufficiency through the
widest possible use of local raw materials.
Work responsibilities and assignments

The work responsibilities and assignments could be described as

follows:

1.) Dividing/keying letters

-Nestle sent loads of letters out to their customer, but not all the
letters could be delivered to the rightful receivers. Whether it is
because of the address is not right, the receiver has moved to new
places or others, these letters would eventually be returned back to
headquarter. Our supervisor would like to know the most popular
reason for the letter being returned, and which province is it from. Our
task is to divide the pile of more than 10,000 returned letters which are
from all over Thailand into provinces, and keying the reason for the
return into a spread sheets. Lastly, we have to convert all this data into
an easy-to-understand format to present to the higher-up.

2.) Making sales

-The team was assigned to help increase sales in ready to drink coffee
for a distribution center in Lad Prao. The area that we worked on is the
Morchit2 area which is a bus terminal. We had to approach every pop-
up store that already had our product displayed or a potential buyer.
The main goal is to make the store that does not have our product
start purchasing it, and make the store that is not buying from our
distribution center start purchasing from us. After the sales is made,
the team had to carefully and specifically write down the address of
each store in order to make the delivery easy for the delivery team,
and the long term relationship between the store and our distribution
center could be further developed

3.) Market survey

-The last project assigned by our supervisor is to conduct a market

survey for Nescafe, and the targeted area is bus terminal and taxi
station in Bangkok. Our team had to go and question people which
includes bus driver, taxi driver, pedestrian, and store in that area on
which ready to drink coffee do they prefer and why do they choose
that brand. The area that we covered includes Victory monument,
Rama3, and Rama4. After we have gathered enough information, our
team then analyzed it and brainstormed for the solutions to help the
company increase its market share and be more profitable with this
line of product.
Problems encountered in assigned tasks

The key problems in each assigned tasks could be described as

follows:

1.) Dividing/keying letters

-Since the task required a lot of collaborated effort from the team, all
members must understand the command and communicate
accordingly. However, there are members in the team that understood
things quite differently than others making it difficult for the whole
team to arrange the letters efficiently. For example, one member did
not let the other members know that she was already arranging letter
from this province making others believe that they could start a new
group which consisted of this province. This did not only slow the
process down, it also caused some erroneous in information. The
communication within the team should be more exact and down-to-
the-point.
-Another big obstacle in this task is the prohibition of internet usage for
non-company’s computer. Since Nestle has its own network available
for every employees to use via the company-provided computer, it is
impossible for our team to efficiently collaborate our work via Dropbox.
The alternative is to use the hot spot wifi connection from each
members’ mobile phones to access the internet; however, it was
utterly slow.

2.) Making sales

-Despite the good reputation of the company we work for, it is still
pretty difficult to newly approach stores to pitch a single sale. Even
though some of the people greeted and spoke to our team nicely,
some are very stiff. One of the store’s clerk even said ‘if you are not
going to buy from us then we have nothing to talk about’, which
caught us by surprise.

-After sales is made, the team need to be able to explain the location
of each stores for the distribution center to make the delivery of the
goods possible by any means. However, one of the team members,
who took the role to write down and take pictures of the location,
carelessly took only one picture of each stores and roughly wrote down
the address, which makes it hard to precisely indicate the location of
the stores.

3.) Market survey

-Again, the problem with internet connection played a huge role in our
location research to do the survey because we need the contact
number of taxi station and bus terminal so we could make sure that
the address is correct.

-Even though we had quite a long list of taxi stations and bus terminals
that we would like to visit, we could only visit a few. More than half of
the list we acquired have moved to somewhere else or have closed
down, which narrowed down our targeted location. We managed to
even things up by surveying more people instead.

-Lastly, participants provided conflicting answers, which makes it really

hard for the team to analyze the data and turn it into useful
information. For example, participants A said that he chose
competitor’s product over our brand because our coffee is too sweet,
and the rival’s good has better aroma. Participants B said that she
chose Nescafe because competitor’s coffee is way too sweet; she likes
her coffee dark. We could conclude that each consumer has their own
way of describing things.
Knowledge gained from the work experience

1.)  Dividing/keying letters

   
We learned to work as a team. Since we had to separate and key
more than 10,000 letters. In order to finish this task we need to have a
very good team work and make sure that every member understands
what she needs to do. Also, a good time management was very
important thing that we gained because we had to finish everything in
a limited time assigned. Moreover, we have improved our skill on using
Microsoft excel to gather all the data and interpret into a graphs and
percentages. Last but not least, we learned how to solve the problems
that occur during our work.

2.) Market Survey/Visit

During our internship we had visited many places such as Victory

Monument, Morchit etc. We have learnt new tips that sales man used
to ask question or offer new products to the buyers. On the other
hands, we have encountered a new experiences that all of us never
faced before. For example, one of our task was to find the reason why
the sales of the company ready to drink coffee is not that good when
compare to competitors. In order to find the solution we needed to
design the questions in the questionnaire. We have also learned how
to approach the interviewee and learned how a survey should be
conducted.

3.) Making sales

 
 Our supervisor supervised us about the importance of Product
Knowledge which will not only help the company wins more sales but
will also help the company has an edge over the competitors. Having
and elaborated product knowledge will help you handle the objections
from customers in a better way. Just presenting the brochure to the
customer does not help, you need to have the proper understanding of
the product in order to explain and persuade the customer to buy the
products. Furthermore, we had learnt to adapt ourselves with new
environment and people.
 
 Contribution of project to the company
1.) Dividing/keying letters
·         Summarize the statistical analysis of the returning letters which
enables the company to solve the problem easily.
            2.)Market visit
·         Received feedback from the customers which enable the
company to increase its performance in order to satisfy customer
needs.
·   Created new sales channels to the area that Nestle Sales team
never visit.
·         Promoted Nestle products to new customers and exist customer
·         Gathered customer detail information such as contact number,
address which is important information for the sales man to deliver the
products to customer.
·         Interviewed both buyers and sellers of ready to drink products
which helps the company improves its Nescafe ready to drink product
in order to increase sales.
·         Arranged Nestle products on the shelves for the retail shops
that have Nestle products. These are special displays of a product or
range of products inside a shop. A printed cardboard display stands
were used along with posters and banners, which displayed around the
shop. This will influence consumer to purchase our products.
·         Handing out free samples for the given products that company
wants to promote such as Nescafe latte, Nestea. This technique
created many new customers after they had tasted our products.
 
3.)Making Sales
·         Added more Nestle’s products into the stores such as Nescafe Latte.
·         Advertised other Nestle’s products to the stores which helped
increase sales and created awareness about the products.
·         Increased sales to the products such as Nestea which is one of the
products that Nestle wants to create more sales.
·         Persuaded new customer to order nestle products which increase
number of nestles customers.
How has the internship expanded/broadened your business
knowledge?
Doing internship at Nestle gave me a great opportunity to
experience not only the routine office life but also an experience to go
out and expose to the real markets. As I have been working in sales
and grocery department, I was assigned to go out and conduct some
sales and relative surveys. Both of the things that seemed to be boring
and nonsense at first turned out to teach me a lot of lesson in the end.
Conducting necessary sales with the sales man helped broadened my
business knowledge in the way that I get to touch the real market.
I get to talk to local sellers who sell Nestle products. We acknowledged
the real problems that they are facing everyday not only with the
customers but also with the sales man.
Even I have learned so much from classes about sales and
marketing theory but this is the first time that I can really imagine how
businesses function and why sales department is so important. I have
learned that in order to be a good marketer, we need to start learning
by doing the sales first. As doing sales help us realize the real problems
that usually occur to the end consumer, so we know what are their real
needs. This way we can come back to the starting point and begin to
conduct the right promotion to serve our end consumers. However,
end consumers don’t necessarily refer to only local sellers but the word
can also refer to some entities such as Makro and Tesco Lotus or even
some other business entities that nestle trade with.
Apart from conducting sales and surveys, I also get to do some
office works, which most of them are documentary. I gained much
more skills of how to do Excel. My supervisor assigned me a project
that deals with returned letters that had been sent to all over Thailand.
This project required me to make an effort and learn some new
techniques of how to use Excel, which I find it very beneficial for my
working life in the future.
Moreover, this internship also broadened my communication
skills of how to contact with people who are in the more senior position
and how to contact with some local sellers. I think it is hard to learn
such kind of skills else where, as we will not get a chance to contact
with these groups of people unless we have to work with them
In summary I can say that internship benefits me in the way
that;
 Enhances classroom learning by integrating academic curriculum
and real-world work experience.
 Internship programs enable me to apply classroom theory to
actual work situations.
 Confirms or redirects career decision-making through on-the-job
experience in a chosen field.
 Internship programs allow me to test out my personal interests
and develop my long-range career plans, and provide a basis to
select elective course work, which integrates my studies and
career goals.
 Internship programs enhance the graduate's marketability by
providing on-the-job training.
 Internship programs develop overall maturity by strengthening
resourcefulness, problem-solving skills, self-confidence, self-
discipline and sense of responsibility.
 Develop human relations skills through interaction in career
settings.
 Improves job opportunities after graduation by giving students
valuable work experience and contact with potential future
employers.
 Provides a better understanding of what is expected if one is to
succeed in the workplace.
 Internships can provide broader, more meaningful work
experience than is often available to an off-the-street hire.
 Teaches valuable job-search skills such as career assessment,
resume writing and interviewing techniques.
General comments and suggestions for the company –not
done yet
In terms of the company’s overview, Nestle is the world's
number one foods company in terms of sales, Nestlé is also the world
leader in coffee (Nescafé). It also makes coffee for the home-brewing
system, Nespresso. Nestlé is one of the world's top bottled water
makers (Nestlé Waters and Minere), one of the biggest cereal makers,
and a big player in the pet food business. However in terms of working
condition Nestle provides the supportive working environment. The
company also better off with its efficient process and working system
which in long term provide strong internal communication and a good
career path for talents.
Cons – Complicated operational management.
Not strong at Corp branding.
Compensation package is not competitive in Asia countries
Lack of actions to poor performers

Advice to Senior Management – Do better Corp branding. Continuous

system improvement.
Improve corp image/reputation i some Asia countries.
Performance evaluation should go along with rewards
Illustration & Annexure (All additional reports, charts, pictures
diagrams)

[Link]-local coffee stores (summary in Excel)

[Link] letters (summary in power point)

 [Link]
vey-Makro (Summary in powerpoint)
[Link]-PPP product (Summary in powerpoint)

[Link] from doing off-site work