Our latest intern blog post comes from Anirudh Thatavarty, who started his journey at Kinaxis as an Associate Solution Consultant (ASC) intern and is now a full-time ASC on our Professional Services team. His transition from intern to full-time employee encompassed significant personal and professional growth.
In this post, Anirudh offers a glimpse into his experience and sheds some light on what it’s really like to work at Kinaxis!
Tell us about yourself and your journey at Kinaxis!
My name is Anirudh Thatavarty, and I’m an ASC on the Professional Services team. I’m a proud Yellow Jacket, with my bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and master’s degree in Analytics from Georgia Tech. My journey at Kinaxis started back in the summer of 2020, when I was an ASC Intern, and then continued when I returned as a full-time employee in March 2023.
What accomplishment as a Co-Op/Intern are you most proud of?
When I was an intern, my main project consisted of creating a services pricing tool that allowed a Client Partner to easily scope out an opportunity and properly staff the delivery of the project. I had the opportunity to directly present the services pricing tool to Client Partners in both North America and EMEA and received constructive feedback about the tool. My work was taken seriously, and this was a fantastic opportunity to gain exposure to how a real business works as an intern. I felt that my work was meaningful to Kinaxis.
How has being a Co-Op/Intern at Kinaxis helped you launch your career? How were you supported as a Co-Op/Intern?
I can point to my internship at Kinaxis as one of the key milestones in my career so far. The internship was my first exposure to supply chains in the real world. I learned about supply chain planning, how technology affected supply chains, and how to network and establish valuable relationships. During my internship at Kinaxis, I developed a strong technical foundation that allowed me to flourish in my other internships and in my previous job in management consulting.
I was well-supported in my internship by many mentors, who I now have the pleasure of working with full-time. Nazli Erdogus, Luiz Solia, Francini Ortiz, and Andy Zeitz are some of the people who made my internship such a fun and rewarding experience. They would always take time out of their day to make sure that I was having fun and learning.
Since returning to Kinaxis, you’ve played a major role in organizing projects and activities for the interns in our Professional Services team. Could you describe the program you’ve designed?
The internship program that we’ve designed is intended to be the career foundation for our interns. It creates a foundation with these three main principles: gaining Supply Chain and RapidResponse® expertise, increasing our teams’ collective wisdom, and networking and attending professional development seminars.
We have designed a complete, end-to-end mock Kinaxis delivery project for our interns, where our interns will implement Demand and Supply Planning for a customer, “Kinected Bicycles,” whose owners are our very own Adam Boland and Shahzad Khurshid. As part of this project, the interns will need to follow the Agile Implementation Methodology, present to leadership and the “customer” on a regular cadence and dig into RapidResponse for an incredible hands-on learning experience.
What can students expect to learn?
We want the interns to learn about supply chains and RapidResponse and to feel excited about Kinaxis as a company. Our product, our leadership, our culture, and most importantly, our people, are what make Kinaxis unique. When I was an intern, the biggest thing I was looking to gain was confidence. I had always felt that school had a high degree of structure and individual work, while the corporate world has a lot more ambiguity, twists, and turns.
As a younger college student doing an internship for the first time, I was excited to see how real-world meetings, companies, and businesspeople operate. Kinaxis was the perfect place to get that first exposure. In addition, I also wanted to compare my supply chain learning from the academic lens to the real-world lens. How do companies operate their supply chains in real life? How do they tackle problems? Kinaxis, being a leader in supply chain planning, was a great launchpad for that, and I hope our new interns have that same experience.
What advice would you give to an incoming Co-Op/Intern?
Take risks and step out of your comfort zone. When you are an intern, the company is your oyster. At a company like Kinaxis, where having a helping and friendly nature is part of our DNA, we are here to welcome you, help you out and make you feel like a part of our team.
Therefore, my advice is to just spread your wings and expand as far as you can. Let’s say you find networking challenging and want to overcome that fear, my response would be – set up that coffee chat, join that call, call that colleague! At Kinaxis, you can easily reach out to people and be met with a positive reaction, every single time. If there’s any topic you want to learn more about, even if it is not related to your department, raise your hand, and ask for it. If it is possible to do, Kinaxis will help you achieve that and make sure you learn it.
Leave a Reply