Alison Lim completed a two month internship at Schneider Electric working on their Transfer Pricing campaign. Her role involved updating product prices in SAP from 2012 to 2013. She learned important Excel skills and how to use SAP. While she made some mistakes along the way, she achieved the goals set by her supervisors. The internship provided valuable experience working in a corporate environment and using important business systems.

1. Alison Lim
16766844
Summer Finance Clerk
Industry Partner: Schneider Electric
Industry Supervisor: Ross Kite
Careers & Cooperative Education
Internship
University of Western Sydney

2. Internship report – Schneider Electric
Executive summary
Schneider Electric is an energy resources company that I have worked at in the past
two months as an intern. My role involved working on the Transfer Pricing campaign
where I was updating the 2012 prices in the system with the new 2013 prices so that
products could be sold to other entities. I’ve learnt quite a few Excel functions along
the way and more importantly how to use SAP. Overall, I believe that I’ve achieved
the outcomes given to me by my supervisors with minimal mistakes. It was a great
learning curve and one that I will never forget.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank all the employees at Schneider Electric for making me feel welcome
throughout my internship.
Thanks to Ross for your supervision and providing me with the opportunity to
become more experienced in the Finance industry.
I sincerely appreciate the time and effort that Schneider Electric has taken to train me,
especially providing me with my supervisors, Isura and Helen. Thanks to both of you
for putting up with my endless questions and your patience with my mistakes. Words
can’t describe how much I have learnt in two months because of you both.
Introduction / Background
Schneider Electric is a Fortune 500 company that specializes in energy management.
The company focuses on making energy safer, more reliable, efficient and productive
for the world to use. It was originally founded in France and now is based in more
than 100 countries.
The project I have been working on is solely based around the Transfer Pricing
campaign. This is perhaps the most crucial project that I have ever worked on, and I
felt privileged to be given such an important task when I had so little experience. My
role involved updating the 2012 prices with the new 2013 prices for Schneider
Electric’s products (called materials) using an accounting program called SAP.
Without transfer pricing, Schneider Electric would not be able to continue selling its
products to its various entities.
Your role and responsibilities
I spent the first month of my internship uploading these new prices into the system. It
was critical that these items be uploaded correctly, otherwise other companies would
not be able to purchase the products they needed at the correct prices. I think I made a
mistake once where I uploaded the wrong prices and this upload overrode the system,
so that if I were to download again from the system, it would show me the wrong
prices as 'right'. In the end I had to go back to the old master files (downloaded prior
to my incorrect upload) to reupload the correct prices. In the second month of the
internship, we found quite a few mistakes from the December uploads (though
apparently not as many as last year’s interns) which we had to correct. In a nutshell,
we had failed to upload some 2013 prices into the system. Normally this would be
okay as the system would automatically take the previous year’s (2012) price,
however for some reason it was taking prices from 2008-09. There were some

3. obvious errors of this – a few parts were priced at $0.01 – and there were not so
obvious errors where I had to check if the price in 2013 was ‘good’ or not. That is,
whether it was recently updated by another team in Schneider, or whether it
represented an old value. I also had to update the freight rates (known as conditions)
for each part.
The Transfer Pricing campaign was the main project I was working on, however I
worked on a few smaller projects on the side. I worked on a reference document
where I had to match up France's materials (or products) with Australia's, since
France's 'A' could be what Australia would call 'B'. It was quite tedious and I had to
keep Google Translate on the entire time since the entire French product list was in
French. Even with the translation, I needed to apply my own judgement to whether it
matched with Australian products since when translated, the products did not exactly
match word for word. I also contributed to another task where I was manually
extracting data from SAP and inputting it into an Excel spreadsheet in ‘cycles’. There
was a lot of responsibility here as attention to detail was critical. This was because the
spreadsheet would be going out to Schneider Electric’s stakeholders to review.
The work culture at the company was very open and welcoming. The employees
appear very relaxed and ready to give a smile. I felt very welcome and at ease in the
office and knew that I could ask any questions that I had. I didn’t get very much
interaction with my Principal Supervisor, Ross, but it was understandable since he
was incredibly busy with his own projects. My direct supervisors, Helen and Isura,
were who I came to for advice the most. I think the fact that I felt so comfortable with
them allowed me to ask more questions rather than making assumptions that the work
I was doing was correct. Clarification of the task and understanding why it was being
performed definitely minimised the mistakes I could have made.
Without my involvement in these tasks, less work would have been completed and the
other employees would have to take on extra responsibilities. By stepping in, I hope I
have reduced some stress levels at least!
Skills and knowledge gained
Learning the various Excel functions were really useful which I think I could really
apply in the workforce when I graduate. I learnt how to do vlookups, trim, filter, text
to columns, exact and more importantly, I learnt how to use SAP, an accounting
program. On the last day of the internship, we all spoke with Ross about what we had
learnt. He agreed with us that UWS did not provide much training in Excel functions
which is a critical skill in the workforce.
Before this internship, I had no idea what transfer pricing was. The other interns had
accounting backgrounds having completed it as part of their degree. The closest thing
I had done to accounting was a first year subject, Accounting information for
managers. Even then, I didn’t do so well in it. That said, I was completely clueless as
to what we were doing and why we were doing it. Now that I do know what it is, if I
were to come across it in another organisation I would be fairly confident I could
complete the task with little problems. Isura explained to me how everything worked
and where the prices came from using a flowchart, and this made more sense to me
because I was a visual learner.

4. I’d definitely like to learn more Excel functions (there’s a whole world of them out
there and I know that I’ve only scraped the surface of it!) and become even more
efficient with computers. I would also like to learn more about SAP and Oracle. By
expanding my experience with these two programs, I think I would increase my
employability skills dramatically.
Outcomes
Overall, I achieved all the tasks that were given to me with minimal mistakes.
However, the mistakes I did make were critical so I spent some time correcting them
throughout the internship and learning to be more careful. My supervisor told us that
two hours of work with us compared to last year’s interns (there were ten) was a day
of work. I was elated to hear that, but at the same time I attribute the productiveness
of our work to our supervisors and to how much knowledge they had to give.
I have found the transition to working life incredibly hard. I would wake up at 7am to
drive every morning, get there at 8:15am to skip the traffic. Then I would sit idle for
45 minutes till I can start. I think overtime it has gotten better and I am used to getting
7 hour sleeps and not feeling tired when I wake up. I definitely feel like I have come
further in these past two months than before. It’s given me some insight into what
working life would be like when I graduate and start working. Our supervisors at
Schneider are very open to questions and stress that there is no deadline for us to
complete our tasks, so we don't really feel any pressure. They only ask that we make
as little mistakes as possible. However seeing how hard they work under pressure and
how long they stayed for in the office made me contemplate just what would be
expected when working in an office position. I have also come to expect this pressure
when I work as well.
Objective assessment
I suppose I did succeed overall in what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to gain the
experience (or the ‘edge’) over other graduates when I applied for programs. I also
know that all companies require entry level finance positions to have some experience
prior to being considered. I had no prior finance experience before coming to
Schneider Electric, and now that I do, I’m confident that my employability skills have
increased.
Career goals
I’m not sure whether this project would have helped me with my career goals. I’d like
to work somewhere in economics and finance, and the transfer pricing campaign
seemed to be more internal auditing and accounting based. I’m hoping to work for a
bank regulator like APRA or the Reserve Bank. I’m sure that almost every company
uses excel so the functions that I learnt to use at Schneider will be quite useful there.
At the moment I’ll be studying my Honours in Economics to enable me to enter into
these jobs. At the same time, I also know that practical experience is always more
preferred to theoretical experience, so I will try and gather as much financial
experience from other companies as I can before tackling this goal.