Weekly report: week 8 of the internship

This week I was really busy with the research of the institutions. This was a big research and took a lot of time, because in the end I had around fifty institutions with all the contact information and some contact person.
When I finished the research of the institutions I had time to work on my assignments and get more information about the subjects. I needed information about the warehouse management, because I did not have any information about this subject. I talked with the warehouse manager and he showed me the process and how he works with the system. In the company they have just started to work with benchmarking for over a few years, but the warehouse manager said it was a really good system for them to check the productivity. They can check this by machine and by individual employee. There are however some figures in the benchmark that are not right for one machine. The reason for this is that this specific machine does not work that often as the other ones, so these numbers need to be changed otherwise this sends the company the information that the productivity on the machine is too low. He also manages the big warehouse they have it is only ten minutes away from the company, so I arranged that I would also visit this one with him before I stop my internship.
In the meeting I had with mister Janssens and David, we discussed some interesting subjects that I could add to my assignments. One of them was information about how they deal with new clients. When they have a new client they always do a credit check on them. They look at the balance sheet and decide if it can be a client of the company or not. When the balance sheet is not bad but also not good they decide that the client must pay a deposit on the total amount, so that they are insured that they get the money. Nowadays with the crisis they do not take as much risks with clients as they used to do before. They do not work with contracts, but they do check the client with the credit agency and they send them special papers they need to fill in. When they have approved the client they send him a welcoming letter with the payment conditions in there. If the client confirms the conditions this is the same as a contract.
In the end of the week I also attended a meeting about the new website of the company. This was not a formal meeting, so there was no agenda or minutes of discussion. However the big structure of the meeting was there. Everyone exchanged ideas, made notes of the tasks they needed to do and when it had to be finished and there was one leader in the meeting.