Finance intern's initiative could save her sponsoring company millions

March 9, 2006 - When Melissa Dubeau started a financial services internship with Coty US, LLC, in May 2005, neither she nor her supervisor anticipated that the then-junior business major would end up helping the company potentially save millions of dollars each year.

As a junior in business management with a concentration in finance, Dubeau said she learned of the opportunity on EPACK, NC State’s online internship and jobs program. Working with Jeff Sackaroff, the college’s director of undergraduate career services, Dubeau polished her resume and cover letter – and landed the position.

She began her Coty experience with the usual two-week process of meeting with the company’s various department directors – logistics, manufacturing, accounts receivable, IT, transportation – ‘everything,” she said, including the customer specialists.

“You try to get a feeling of what you would like to work on during the course of your internship,” Dubeau said. At one of her meetings, a customer service representative explained the volume of paperwork that she routinely completed on a daily basis. The paperwork dealt with the ‘vendor noncompliance deduction’ that the company had to pay out to its customers because of late shipping or other order processing issues.

A fairly common problem in business, the noncompliance issues could result in millions of dollars of fines each year.

“Once I found this out,” Dubeau said, “I decided that I had to try to do something about this. We had always known it was a problem, but no one could put the attention to it that it deserved. It should be a full-time job, and needs someone who can understand the full scope of the problem.”

Interns typically provide the extra hand that enable companies to address such problems. With plenty of fresh-from-the-classroom knowledge that they are eager to apply, interns are ready to take on such individual projects.

“Coty has a very active intern recruitment program that offers opportunities in many functional areas of the company,” said Evelyn Church, customer financial services director for Coty operations in Sanford, NC, a division of Coty Wordwide, and Melissa’s supervisor.

“Melissa, as well as previous interns in the customer financial services department, have chosen to extend their employment with our company and in each case, the intern or hiree has proven to be a valuable member of the team,” Church said.

Dubeau approached her boss with an idea for delving into Coty’s situation and “she gave me free reign” to work out a method for controlling it. As her summer internship was coming to a close, Dubeau developed and presented Church a proposal that would allow her to continue working on the project. Her proposal was accepted and Dubeau continued working on the project after her internship ended.

“Melissa has proven to be the perfect fit for this project,” Church said. “She has a good grasp of general business concepts and she has the right disposition and personality to resolve issues and make a difference.”

Dubeau created two quality management teams and developed a process for drilling down into company operations to identify the root cause of the various order processing-related problems.

“Each team focused on one problem at a time,” she said, “brainstorming and doing root cause analyses to identify the cause the problem in each instance. Our last step will be to create an action plan and strategy to streamline processes in related departments and control the problem.” The teams will then present their recommendations to the Steering Committee, that is made up of different department directors, and ultimately implement their recommendations and monitor results, “to make sure it does what it was supposed to do,” she said.

Dubeau, age 21, has been leading the bimonthly meetings with staff members who, on average, are about twice her age. She’s learned to hold her own, but notes that she’s not new to the corporate environment. She grew up watching her mother, Robin Dashman, who has owned several manufacturing companies.

“I’ve been going to trade shows and have had business exposure in the manufacturing industry since I was a baby, so to me, this is what I want to do,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve had my hand in it, though,” she said. “It’s a fun job, and it stimulates me constantly. There’s always a new puzzle to solve.”

One of those puzzles involved a basic human relations issue - how to motivate teams to stay on task.

“I never had management experience, so leading this group and motivating a bunch of adults – I’m trying to find the best approach,” she said, " but it’s fine. I have a great group of people and they are really motivated.”

Dubeau said that she has drawn on what she learned while writing papers and completing other projects at school, including a term paper on the motivation of team employees. “The motivation comes from inside us,” she said. “You can’t force someone to do something and expect them to be passionate about it.”

One thing that Dubeau has learned from her internship is that she is passionate about operations.

“I think all things happen for a reason,” she said, “and I definitely think I got this job for a reason. It’s so suited to my interests, and I didn’t even realize it. When I first started, I thought for two weeks that I would be lost, would never learn anything about this company, and that it was all too complicated.”

She has learned otherwise in the course of her internship and self-made assignment.

“In the past, I worked in a restaurant as a cook,” Dubeau said. “It is a very male dominated industry, and I always heard, ‘Why aren’t you doing the things that the other girls do, like baking.”

Church presents a different perspective. “She has helped me greatly,” Dubeau says. “It’s good to see a strong, witty woman running a department. I look up to her for that. I want to be that kind of a director.”

Dubeau is a member of the Alpha Kappa Psi chapter at NC State’s College of Management. She graduated from East Chapel Hill High School in 2002.