(Internship) Automating purchasing workflows at Emerson
During my third year in the CMI program, I completed a three-month internship at Emerson Process Management in Cernay, France. I worked with the purchasing department to understand a fragmented workflow built around spreadsheets, manual status updates, quote requests, supplier follow-ups, and repeated data checks across internal tools.
The goal was to reduce repetitive work and give buyers a more reliable way to track purchasing workflows. I first implemented short-term automation with Excel macros and Power Automate, then designed and built a longer-term full-stack web platform.
The application used an Angular frontend, an Express backend, and a MySQL database. It synchronized purchasing workflow data from enterprise sources, exposed REST APIs for workflow management, and gave users an interface for filtering, assigning, commenting on, and tracking purchasing tasks. I also worked on authentication, buyer profiles, supplier management, request-for-quote automation, Docker-based deployment, and technical documentation.
This project taught me how to translate operational problems into software architecture, how to work with non-technical users, and how to defend engineering choices inside a real industrial environment. The resulting platform removed a major amount of manual coordination work and was estimated to save more than 800 hours per year.
I am not publishing the full internship report because it contains internal workflow details, tool names, contact information, and implementation specifics that are better kept private.