GRADUATES BLOG

Projects as a PM Graduate in Arla

Hello, my name is Christian Rohde and I am a PM Graduate from batch 2022. If you are reading this, you might be interested in applying for the Production Management Graduate Programme. My first rotation is at Esbjerg dairy and I will try to describe what kind of projects I am responsible for.

I have been assigned multiple projects and one of them is Supplier Driven Assessments. The purpose of this is to collaborate and use the capabilities of our suppliers to improve sustainability and performance. Areas that have been addressed are among others: Lights, Frequency converters and HVAC. My role is to organise these assessments and address any questions that might arise before, during, or after the assessment.

In November, I had the pleasure of attending a Total Plant Assessment (TPA) with Ecolab which is a more intensive form of assessment. The purpose is to identify sustainable and cost-saving initiatives in the utility and process area and quantify the potential savings of these initiatives.

The process takes around 4 and a half days with the first two days revolving around understanding the current setup at the dairy and collecting a large amount of information based on their observations. The following two days are used to calculate the potential savings. The last day is a debriefing to present the overall findings in terms of the number of initiatives, the investment size of these, and the savings in terms of cost, energy and CO2. However, after the debriefing session, the Ecolab team will use 3-4 weeks to compute a final report by describing each initiative and adjusting the calculation of these potentials.

I was responsible for the utility part, meaning supporting Ecolab in gathering the required information for the utility area. I hosted a site tour for Ecolab to observe and assess the setup of the utility equipment e.g., gas boilers, RO-water treatment, compressed air system etc. Naturally, this led to many questions which resulted in multiple sessions had to organised with our internal experts to address Ecolab’s questions. This also involved different activities such as organising the inspecting of evaporative condensers, contacting suppliers to address equipment-specific questions, taking samples of condensate from UHT systems and having it analysed by the laboratory to determine if the condensate is suitable for reuse, etc.  

The week brought lots of learning opportunities, especially in terms of understanding technical aspects of the utility, but also establishing professional relations with both internal experts and the Ecolab team.

Christian Juhl Rohde

Production Management Graduate

Period: 2022-2024

Christian Juhl Rohde
Arla Foods
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