Intern report: Supply chain internship with Lennox International

Chetan Phani Parchuri is a candidate in Weatherhead's full-time MBA program.

Over the summer I interned with Lennox International Inc. (LII) in Dallas, Texas. LII is a global provider of climate control solutions. With $3.9 Billion in revenue, it operates in three segments: residential heating and cooling, commercial heating and cooling, and refrigeration. I interned with the supply chain group, particularly with the commercial demand planning team.

Prior to my MBA program, I worked for five years as a project engineer with the project management team of India’s biggest construction company. Making a career switch into the realm of supply chain management was not easy and my core courses at Weatherhead, particularly on statistics and operations, helped me immensely over the duration of my internship. The design course that I had in the spring semester was very helpful as it equipped me with tools and insights to look at things from the perspective of the user. This helped me generate reports and tools that were extremely user friendly.

I enjoy working on intellectually stimulating problems and my internship gave me ample opportunities to explore new areas by working on novel problems and learning simultaneously from them. One particular assignment this summer was so analytically demanding and challenging in its scope that I had to seek guidance from my statistics professor, who granted me an independent study this semester to explore and understand how optimization modeling works in order to make better sense of the tool that I had developed over the summer.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time working at Lennox. It gave me immense exposure to various facets of supply chain management along with an opportunity to carry out actual demand planning for a product line. My team mates and managers went out of their way to mentor me. There were also a lot of activities organized by the human resources team to help acquaint interns with the overall business, and have fun and network at the same time. I made a lot of friends and mentors for life which made my summer internship in Texas an extremely rewarding and memorable one.