NORTH SOUTH UNIVERSITY
BUS 489-Internship
Submitted To:

Adnan Habib (Intern Faculty)
Lecturer
School of Business North South University

ACI Agribusiness

Submitted By:

Mushfiqur Rashid Chowdhury ID: 111 0195 030 North South University Date of Submission: 25th April, 2015

INTERNSHIP
R E P O R T

Table of Contents

Contents | Page No. | Overview of the organization, department and people | 05 | Contribution to the organization | 06-07 | Lessons Learned | 08-09 | Interaction with supervisors | 09 | Dealt with difficulties encountered | 09-10 | Difference between expectation and experience | 10 | Influence in career plans | 10-11 | What would I do differently if I had to redo this internship | 11 | Appendix | 12-21 |

Letter of Transmittal
April 25, 2015
To
Adnan Habib
Lecturer
North South University, Dhaka,
Bangladesh.

Subject: Submission of Internship Report

Dear Sir,

It is a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to prepare my internship report which is prepared as a partial requirement of the Internship Course BUS 489 of BBA program under Department of Business Administration, North South University.
In this internship report I have tried to come up with the experiences I have gathered from my three month stay in ACI Agribusiness under the Strategic & Planning department. I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to have the chance to prepare my internship report under you.
If you have any further enquiry concerning any additional information, I would be very pleased to clarify the information.
Thank you.
Sincerely yours,

Mushfiqur Rashid Chowdhury
ID: 111 0195 030
North South University

Acknowledgement
To begin with I am thankful to the almighty Allah for giving me the strength to perform my responsibilities as an intern and complete the internship report within the stipulated time. I had to do plenty of tasks to which I was quite oblivious. Despite all those apprehensions and qualms I managed to get hold of the whole concept of the internship, and the person to thank for it is my very own faculty Adnan Habib, Lecturer, North South University, for his deep hearted supervision during my organizational attachment at ACI Agribusiness. He has been very helpful throughout my internship program, allowing me to consult him whenever I got stuck with any area of this report. His foreknowledge and intellect has been very crucial to my report as he gave me information which is difficult to hoard nowadays. I am also grateful to M.Saifullah (Head of Strategy, ACI Agribusiness), as my organizational supervisor. It would have been very difficult to prepare this report up to this mark without their guidance. My precious gratitude goes to North South University for their graceful support and facilities which facilitate theoretical knowledge with real life situation. Last but not the least; I would like to convey my heart felt gratitude to Md. Haris, Manager Business Analysis and Planning, ACI Agribusiness and Abrar Shahriyar Mridha, Business Intelligence Analyst, ACI Agribusiness for their immense support during my internship period. Moreover, I would like to express my gratitude to ACI Agribusiness fellows, seniors, colleagues and the blue collars who gave me good advice, service, suggestions, inspiration and support. I must mention the wonderful working environment and group commitment of this organization that has enabled me to deal with a lot of things. My thanks also go to friends and family for caring and respecting my purpose of a research and encouraging me all the way.

Overview of the organization:
ACI Agribusiness is the largest integrator in Agriculture and Livestock and Fisheries. These businesses have subunits like Seed, Fertilizer, Agri-machineries, Animal Health, Premiaflex and Cropex. These businesses have glorified presence in Bangladesh. ACI Agribusiness values include quality, customer focus, fairness, transparency, continuous improvement and innovation.
Seed supplies Hybrid Rice, vegetable and Maize seeds, Fertilizer Supplies Micronutrient and fertilizer, Agri-machineries supplies Tractors, Power Tiller and Harvester and Animal Health supplies high quality Nutritional, Veterinary and Poultry medicines and vaccines. ACI Agribusiness is having strong partnership with national and international R & D companies, universities and research institutions. Before introducing any product, it is elaborately tested in the laboratory and farmer’s field. ACI Agribusiness has a large, knowledgeable and highly skilled field force provides training and technical advices to the farmers.
ACI is significantly contributing to national food security through its Agribusinesses division, which is the leading agricultural integrator of the country. ACI Agribusinesses is providing complete solution to the farmers need. This division has six separate SBUs. They are Seeds, Fertilizer, Motors, Premiaflex, Cropex and Animal Health. Farmers have developed confidence in our products for quality and economics. Farmers have also come to expect proper knowledge based service from our field force.
I was in the Strategic and Planning Department of ACI Agribusiness which mainly deals with the operational activities for running all the six SBU’s in ACI Agribusiness. The department ensures day to day activities related to planning, forecasting, budgeting, making necessary arrangements for any required assistance from any of the SBU’s. The people in my department and around my department are very cooperative and helpful in nature. In the last three months it was a wonderful experience working with them as it allowed me to learn, develop and understand the practicality of working in real life scenario in a corporate environment.

Contribution to the organization:
Roles and responsibility during internship program at ACI:
Activities performed under the strategic planning and operation department functioning for six Strategic Business Units (SBU) in ACI Agribusiness: * As part of internal financial management and measuring growth following financial statements prepared for all six Strategic Business Units (SBUs) such as: Seeds, Fertilizer, Motors, Annual Health, Premiaflex Plastic Limited and Crops of ACI Agro-Business. These activities include. * * Financial review and/or variance analysis for Budget vs. Achievement along with arrange to manage comments for over and under achievements up to certain percentages from six SBUs * * Prepared and reviewed monthly reports covering six SBUs relating to over viewing Sales, Portfolio Performance, Promotional activities of new products, measuring credit performance and inventory etc. * * Prepared monthly minutes of meetings following reviewing of over-all financial picture covering P&L Account and Credit performance of six SBUs.

* Helped in prepared a presentation of the SBU “Cropex” for the Managing Director. The presentation focused on the huge potentialities of the business unit and its future plan.

* Prepared a presentation on how to develop and commercialize “Bio-Life (A monthly publication of ACI- Agribusiness).

* While being strong and versatile in writing English, I was assigned to write different articles for the magazine Bio-life.

* Inputted data on SPSS for market research on a new product of ASRBC (Advanced Seed Research and Biotech Centre), Cherry Tomato. * * Collected data on UDP (Urea Deep Placement) technology for gaining grant from the “USAID-Feed the Future- Partnering for innovation program.”

* Collected data of Fisheries sector in Bangladesh and analysed them, during that period I came to know that Bangladesh ranks fourth globally on fresh water fish production, and it made me very proud. * While strong and versatile in writing English, ACI authority assigned responsibility for preparing Bio-Life, a monthly publication magazine of ACI Agribusiness. *

Lessons Learned:
The main lesson that I learned from my experience in the last three months was the practical application of the knowledge gained from what I have learned from studying at North South University. I did a dual major In Finance & Accounting and Marketing, which I have covered practically during the last three months in great details. As for finance and accounting I have consistently worked with preparing Budget vs. Achievement spreadsheet, review of minutes meeting, monthly report. If it comes to Marketing I have dealt with different upcoming strategies of all the six SBUs and prepared presentations on improving the monthly magazine “Bio-life” and commercializing it. I have worked with the monthly meeting reviews. This minute of monthly meeting comprised of budgeted and achieved figures of profit, total debtor and the overdue period for the month of January of all the six departments. It also consists of the projected profit, debtor and overdue period of February and March for which some analysis were being done regarding the changes from the budgeted and actual figures. By collecting all the data’s the total profit from agribusiness sector was summed up for the month of January and a projected figure for February and March was also summarized. This monthly report also contained a table of budgeted, projected and actual profit and loss account of last year in comparison to the budgeted, projected figures of January and February. I learned a lot of things practically while gathering, placing the figures and analyzing them with the help of my supervisor. Budget vs. Achievement excel sheet comprised of a profit and loss account of all the departments with a comparison between the figures in year 2014 and the months of January, February and March which would allow them to analyze year and month wise growth in all the sectors. After observing my knowledge in Marketing they also allowed me to help and develop opportunities for the SBU “Cropex.”. Other than the applications of the theoretical knowledge I also had the opportunity to learn to write and edit quality reports and proposals in corporate structure. Working with so many employees from different backgrounds and ethnicities it allowed me to enrich my interpersonal and communication skills very fluently making me versatile in terms of negotiation in every way possible. Moreover, I have attended a Strategic Workshop hosted by the planning department and I feel proud that I was the only intern to be invited in there. I was awarded with a certificate of attendance and a book of marketing principles by Philip Kotler. I was also told to extend my internship period for an extra month, which I did and it helped me to gain some extra knowledge being in a corporate environment.
Interaction with Supervisor:
My enhanced interpersonal skills allowed me to closely monitor and identify the needs of my supervisor which made me well suited to his requirements. Working together in a corporate environment like ACI has many advantages as well as certain setbacks, but my communication with my supervisor was more of a cooperative and learning attitude. He allowed me to portray my side of ideas and information’s to know my way of thinking and then give his opinion and preferences. He believes in a give and take attitude from all the employees so working and staying with him in different occasions such as meetings, seminars, events and even having lunch together has connected both of us in a mutually beneficial way. He was very kind and generous in letting me adjust to the tasks assigned at first but made me do new multitasking tasks for helping me gain diversification for my personal development. There were a number of occasions when I got stuck but he was welcoming enough to help me solve any kind of problems whenever I got stuck.
Constraints – Dealt with difficulties:
I did not face any real difficulties in this four month internship period but at first was not well known with other colleagues in the department so had to mix with them and then was able to work with them properly without facing any constraints. The culture of this organization is very friendly and the people here are very cooperative in dealing with any sort of problems. One of the problems I had was typing in Bangla which I quickly overcame by learning and using the Avro software. There were many other tailor made applications for the use of office employees only for e.g.( SDMS Mirror) which was not easy for me to operate in the first place but as I went on working with the software’s and applications it became really helpful in blending everything together and producing the output as effectively as possible.

Expectation and Experience:
My expectation and experience at ACI Agribusiness matched perfectly as I came to understand relate and implement all the theories I have been studying at North South University. My expectation was well satisfied at ACI Agribusiness as I thought that I would try to learn new ways of engaging into corporate environment, relate and implement the knowledge acquired from the university and gain good communication and networking skills. This expectation was further acknowledged by the experience I got from ACI Agribusiness as it gave me more than my expectations. I acquired huge knowledge both in terms of theories and practicality relating to my major courses-Finance & Accounting and Marketing Strategies. These experiences was not only related to my field of study but a huge impact in diversifying my knowledge through marketing plans, promotions and presentations as well as learning the full implications and uses of both known and unknown applications and software’s which has vastly boosted my internet utility. Constantly reviewing and upgrading my theoretical knowledge with the implementation of practical tasks at ACI Agribusiness has greatly influenced my experience compared to my expectations. This environment has practically met my required expectations as per my criteria’s in successfully completing my internship at ACI Agribusiness. Influence in Career Plans:
My internship at ACI Agribusiness has greatly influenced my career plans in terms of knowing which field of work I want to pursue in the future. As my expectation and experience matched perfectly enough it was sufficient for me to ensure my career path. I have already set my plans while selecting my dual major in Finance & Accounting and Marketing which I have acquired practical knowledge in a very smooth way at ACI Agribusiness. This internship has allowed me to sustain what I have learned and to implement in a proper way. Learning such a huge amount of work in such a short period of time in terms of experience was time-efficient as well as a great impact to the fact that I could use my knowledge to greater use in my practical life. Knowing that the usage of these works learned both at ACI and North South University has allowed me to gain access in the field of competitive business in excelling at greater heights. My aim towards competing internationally in the field of business and mainly focusing towards the financial management side has shown great rewards and satisfaction in my short experience at ACI Agribusiness. Hence, knowing what I want to do and living it to accomplish the goal I have set for the future is absolutely fundamental which ACI Agribusiness has allowed me to sustain.
Doing something different while redoing internship:
If I had to redo this internship it would have been mostly a repetition for me in terms of what I have learned and accomplished so far in the past three months. I have almost covered most of the areas by staying in the Strategic and Planning department as it maintains and operates all the functional activities of all the six SBU’s. I have ensured that I do not miss any opportunity in terms of knowing and accomplishing any unknown task or software usage for my own personal development and also for the betterment in contribution to ACI Agribusiness. Still, if I had the opportunity or chance to redo this internship I would have done the tasks repeatedly for bringing efficiency and more confidence to the work I have been doing here for the past three months. Though I already have enhanced myself in the following attributes I would try to further enhance higher development in terms of communication, personal development and organization development by efficiently using time management, multitasking abilities and interpersonal skills.

APPENDIX
Journal 1
I am doing a sector analysis of the overall fisheries sector in Bangladesh. The sector analysis includes the entire value chain, trends, and different prices of the fisheries industry. This analysis is giving me an idea about the overall market situation and the overall business of fish in Bangladesh as well as export of fish across different countries over the world. The export of frozen food is second after the RMG sector in Bangladesh in bringing foreign currency in Bangladesh. In this week I had to input the date of a survey for a new product of ACI-Agribusiness, “Cherry Tomato” in SPSS software. The aim was to find out whether the new product is suitable for the market or not. This helped me to enhance my skills of SPSS software and fulfilled my wish to do a real life market research. I helped in preparing the “Monthly report” of the overall Agribusiness unit of ACI. It included inputting data in Microsoft Excel and calculating the budget and actual sales, Cost of goods sold of the overall agribusiness, Profit before Tax of the overall Agribusiness unit of ACI. I wrote two articles in the monthly publication of ACI-Agribusiness “Bio-life”. One article is about a product recently brought to the market by ACI-Animal Health called “Mastitis detector.” Mastitis is a disease of the cows and this detector helps to detect Mastitis in the pre-clinical stage and helps the farmers to produce high quality milk and to save a lot of money. The other article was about the collaboration of ACI- Agribusiness with Rajshahi University in producing top quality rice to meet the growing food demand of Bangladesh. Moreover, I collected the email IDs of all the Universities in Bangladesh for a new project to be undertaken by ACI- Agribusiness.

Journal 2
In the last week I have helped the Strategy and Planning team in making presentations. The presentations included the market definition, sub markets, target markets and positioning of all the strategic business units of ACI-Agribusinesses. The presentation also included the strategies and action plans of all the SBUs for the year of 2015. It was made for the managing director of ACI. I came to know about the SWOT of all the SBUs during making the presentation. PEST and 5C analysis was also included in there. It gave me a good idea on how strategies are formed by taking into account the internal and external situations. During making the presentation I have calculated the growth rates over the years of each of the business units of Agribusiness.
Moreover alongside making presentations I am continuing my analysis on the Fisheries or the Aqua sector. During my work I have found out that the fisheries sector is an extremely potential sector with tremendous scopes of growth.
In the last week the notable incident that happened in ACI was a program arranged by Premiaflex.
I helped in preparing cards for all the invitees. Premiaflex is a SBU under the agribusiness unit of ACI. Premiaflex is associated with plastic packaging and its customers includes multinationals like Unilever and other noteworthy companies.

Journal 3

My second week’s work started exactly with my field of expertise. I was assigned to prepare and edit monthly review meeting for the month of February which I was pleased to start with being a finance major. This minute of monthly meeting comprised of budgeted and achieved figures of profit, total debtor and the overdue period for the month of January of all the six departments. It also consists of the projected profit, debtor and overdue period of February for which some analysis were being done regarding the changes from the budgeted and actual figures. By collecting all the data’s the total profit from agribusiness sector was summed up for the month of January and a projected figure for February was also summarized. This minute also contained a table of budgeted, projected and actual profit and loss account of last year in comparison to the budgeted, projected figures of January and February. I learned a lot of things practically while gathering, placing the figures and analyzing them with the help of my supervisor. I have done these accounting and financial works in my finance courses but practically applying my knowledge has enhanced my learning a lot. While preparing this monthly review meeting I was also working with more Bio-life write ups, collected different information and data’s for certain ongoing projects for ACI Agribusiness by communicating with specific department executives and was also actively engaged in preparing and finalizing project proposals for all the sectors with the help of my supervisor.

Journal 4

I started continuing my work with the monthly review meeting in the third week. While doing this work I realized that there are certain problems such as mismatching of figures while collecting the information from the specified departments and figuring out the correct ones. My supervisor was very helpful in making me understand the way to deal with such problems while collecting and finalizing the figures in the monthly meeting. I was also given the responsibility of preparing budget vs. achievement excel sheet which would comprise of a profit and loss account of all the departments with a comparison between the figures in year 2014 and the months of January, February and March which would allow them to analyze year and month wise growth in all the sectors. These tasks assigned were time consuming but I was giving my best efforts firstly to enhance my practical experience and also to finish and provide quality to the work on time. Apart from these I was briefed about an upcoming presentation for the Managing Director where I was assigned to assist in preparing the presentation for the SBU Cropex and its future aspects and potentialities. I started discussing with the executives in those departments to figure out the outline of the presentation.

Journal 5

I continued preparing the Budget vs. Achievement spreadsheet in this week which really helped me in remembering and implementing the knowledge learned from my finance courses in the university. In this week I also collected different data on Urea Deep Placement technology for a grant project funded by the USAID, called “Feed the Future program.” Urea deep placement is a technology by which farmers can double their rice production and simultaneously reduce the urea usage in their lands. In the process I also developed a value chain in how all the six strategic business units of ACI- Agribusiness can help in producing and delivering this technology to the farmers, which will also aid in the food security of the country.

Journal 6

This week I was given absolutely a new kind of work in preparing the monthly report which really helped me gain great insights in arranging and preparing quality reports. I started my work on preparing the monthly report for the month of March which is the accumulation of all the departments’ total overview in all sectors of the previous month in one single report. It was very important to find out each and every SBU’s sales performance, portfolio performance, and promotional activities done for their new products, credit performance and inventory etc in the month of February. These figures and analysis from the respective departments head for the purpose of their over and under-statement had to be all piled up in one page for each department. It was a very detailed work of what each SBU is achieving against what it had budgeted for that particular month. It was very helpful for me to gather the information from the department heads and executives as it allowed me to communicate and get to know most of the people in ACI Agribusiness department. With my increasing communication I also had the opportunity to gather some very helpful insights from the employees both related to my work and career. My experience with the staffs was very notable as they were very free to share their thoughts of why their department succeeded or failed in the previous month allowing me to get an easy answer. I also continued writing the Bio-life and press release which I have become really fond of as most of these Bio-life and press releases are published in different agro newspapers, brochure booklets and online magazines so it was very notable in a sense that my exact writings were being printed and published in newspapers and online magazines as well. Journal 7
I started this week by reviewing the analysis of the monthly report with my supervisor. The monthly reports were very detailed so we had to double check and do cross referencing because this report would be presented in front of the board in order to give them an idea about the present condition of the six SBU’s. Then I went back to my financial reporting of the monthly review meeting through which I was really gathering some practical understanding by implementing the theoretical knowledge gained from the university in my finance courses. I was able to match and relate the concepts which really made me understand and enjoy my work allowing me to prove my ability to everyone. These reports and review meeting also proved to be very beneficial as it was really helping me gain new and valuable operations in MS-Office, SDMS Mirror (ACI Software) and SPSS. I was able to learn and implement much new operation mainly in Ms-Excel, Ms- PowerPoint and SPSS which I think would really help me in the future as means of proper technological advancement through internet utilities. The next work I was assigned was for ACI Agribusiness research work done through collection and analysis of information regarding fertilizer, agro machineries, livestock and agro ecological zone. These information’s had to be collected through different sources such as – visiting agro industries, companies (both public & private), online agro newspapers, articles, magazines and with the help of each department’s database library in ACI Agribusiness. All the information has to be segmented and compiled in different files for the better understanding of the readers through which it will allow the management to gain valuable insights of the present condition and help everyone do a better forecasting of the requirements and needs for the future.

Journal 8
I continued preparing the monthly review meeting and this time I was multitasking a lot of works together as it was the last week of the month. I became very efficient with the review meeting work as I had been doing it for a couple of weeks so I easily managed to finish one up and start the next task which was to continue collecting the remaining data’s and information’s from the possible sources and plot them in tables, graphs and charts for easy analysis of what the information’s really meant. In this way I was also able to know and identify the use of different forecasting tools and techniques in analyzing real facts and figures practically through Ms-Office and other software used only for ACI purpose. These tools allowed me to present the facts and figures more prominently and in a standard way which really caught the eyes of the management and I was also being appreciated for my work. This again allowed me to gain some interpersonal relationship with my colleagues and supervisor as they were impressed with my work and was ready to share some valuable inside and outside insights of being in a job life. Then I also continued my financial journey further by engaging into the spreadsheet work Budget vs. Achievement, which made me realize that I got my teachings well enough as I did not have to ask for assistance while doing my work. I really did retain a lot of what I have been taught during my internship program here at ACI.

Journal 9

I started my third month of the internship program by starting to prepare a credit approval and cancellation form for the dealers. It is seen that ACI gives out their products to the dealers on credit. Credits are given based on some criteria and if the dealer fails to payback within the stipulated time, then that dealer is cancelled off from the credit delivery list. The form I made was to ensure that the dealers have that required eligibility to attain products on credit.
Moreover in this week I helped in preparing a presentation on the future of ACI-Agribusiness through the Strategic planning team. That presentation included the new tools and techniques which can be used to improve efficiency and productivity among all the SBUs. The presentation included topics like Enterprise resource planning, Project Management Office (PMO) etc. These topics were presented during the strategic workshop hosted by the planning team and later on a copy of that presentation was delivered to the Managing director.

Journal 10
In this week I was assigned to find out the most efficient supply chain of the country. It was not at all an easy task. I had to go through the supply chains of the large MNCs functioning in the FMCG sector and also some large local companies. I had to find out huge supply chain was the most efficient in cost saving and profit generation. This was an initiative to enhance the productivity of the SBU Cropex, which aims in providing the maximum benefit to the root level farmers and also providing fresh food and vegetables to the customers. Cropex has been undergoing a very tough time from its inception. It is not easy at all to provide maximum benefit to the root level farmers through the traditional supply chain. Cropex has been going through a negative growth over the past few months and the strategic team is still trying hard to revamp this particular SBU.