I have been on the Cadbury Schweppes graduate scheme for almost a year now and to try and sum up what I have done in that time in one small paragraph is going to prove extremely difficult to do!!!!
I have been working in supply chain finance at Bournville looking after the spend for Milk Tray and Easter Egg production, as well as the entire indirect spend for the factory. In brief I have found my time here to be both extremely challenging and rewarding.
My biggest problem initially was learning to get out of bed and be in the office for 8am (4 years of mid-morning lectures at university along with the mid-week partying had not prepared me well for that!). Along with that came a very steep learning curve on how the factory operates and how we support that from a finance perspective. There is a big emphasis on the 'real roles not placements' here and I quickly realised that through the reliance placed on me, by my business partners. This means at first it can be terrifying trying to report financial performance to a group of manufacturing managers, especially when you know that their years of knowledge at Bournville dwarfs what you have learned in two months!!
Having quickly addressed the longstanding relationship with my sleeping patterns, moved most (but not all) of my partying to the weekends and having got to grips with Bournville, I can honestly say that I have really have enjoyed working in the factory. The role requires that you work with so many different stakeholders from different areas of the business, so you meet a lot of people very quickly. One day you can be out in the factory working on finances for Easter Eggs (which is a real life 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory experience, providing you exclude the finance part......), the next day you can be forecasting with the distribution team and the day after that you could be sitting down with the factory engineers.
There has also been loads of other stuff to get involved with - earlier in the year I helped in the finance recruitment drive for 2007/2008 by supporting grad recruitment at Bath Uni (still trying to live the student dream!) and I have recently had a great time on the graduate community project trip in Poland.
Back in the factory, the initially scary thought of presenting financial performance to manufacturing has become a really rewarding experience and it always helps to work in an office where you can enjoy free chocolate... On that note, I think I'd better head to the gym.......
Comments are forwarded to the author and those that we think will be useful to other readers will be posted on the site.