How do you make a Swede panic? Easy, put her in a 35°C hot Shanghai subway station in the middle of rush hour. For a person growing up in a municipality with a population of around 10 000 people, a city of 24 million can take some time getting used to. However, once you learn how to take a deep breath and relax in the crowds (and just accept that you’ll never be able to walk in the pace you want), Shanghai can be a really fun place to live! There sure isn’t a lack of things to do anyway. I won’t go into too much detail here (come visit Shanghai and I can tell you more over a beer instead) but during my time here I have been singing my throat dry in a KTV, visited tons of tourist spots, spent a Saturday on an international beer festival and last but not least: enjoyed an amazing team building activity in a mountain area outside the city.

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So what about work? Well, believe it or not but I actually do spend some time on work as well. Just as I suspected in my last blogpost, November has been extremely busy, probably my most intense month as a trainee so far. However, I see this as a good way to challenge myself since I know that if I want to excel in my career, these stressful periods will undoubtedly be part of it. Moreover, the extra hours don’t feel that heavy since the projects I am working on are so interesting. One of the best parts of the trainee program, as I see it, is that I get to take on much responsibility and that the tasks that are given to me feel very challenging. It’s encouraging to see that colleagues at Husqvarna Group trust us trainees with difficult tasks and want to see us develop.
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Last week I spent most of my time running a value engineering workshop in product packaging. We had a cross-functional team working hard to come up with good ideas for improvement and we received a lot of valuable input from the different functions. Additionally, we had one day where we invited suppliers to participate in the workshop, which gave us even more interesting ideas and insights. This goes back to what I wrote about in my last post: that the suppliers are the experts when it comes to their specific parts and by including them, we can get new ideas that we could not possibly come up with ourselves. Another fun thing about this workshop was that Husqvarna Group’s President and CEO actually paid us a (very) short visit, it’s encouraging to see that even top management take an interest in these kind of projects.

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This week however, it’s time to shift focus and prepare for long days at the office, because in only one week from now we will be holding our Asian supplier day in our Changzhou plant in China. This time, I have been assigned project leader for this event, which of course puts a lot of responsibility on me but, as I already mentioned, this is something I enjoy and I have a really great team to work with. Anyway, I should probably go back to work now since I have a meeting coming up soon. A planning meeting for one of the five (!) innovation workshops we will run on the next supplier day.

Next time you hear from me I will be in Japan, looking forward to give you an update about Tokyo!

Lisa Barrehag
Global Trainee
Sourcing

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