Skills and Experiences

The following will highlight my work experiences and technical abilities!

Project Coordinator

Intro

A lot goes into getting food to our plates, and with technology advancing rapidly, the future of sustainable farming and animal nutrition lies in big tech. At Trouw Nutrition, I gained valuable insight into how impactful technology can be in shaping the future of feed production and distribution.

What is Trouw Nutrition?

Trouw Nutrition is a company that is a part of Nutreco. Trouw Nutrition a leader in animal nutrition and plans on using technology to feed the growing population in a sustainable manner. There are several locations across Canada and internationally, in Ontario the two locations are in St Marys and Puslinch.

At Trouw Nutrition, everyone plays an important role in ensuring customers produce as much feed as possible for Feeding the Future. There are many roles in technology that play a huge part in that vision as well.

Trouw Nutrition offers a wide range of services/products with animal feed being at the core of most of them.

Job Description

As a Project Coordinator intern, I began my role by learning Amino, a predictive ordering software designed to replace Excel sheets in customizing and delivering animal feed. Initially, it was challenging to grasp Amino's complexity, especially with no prior knowledge of broiler chickens and feed delivery. However, after familiarizing myself with the application and its API-driven communication for deliveries and orders, I was able to thoroughly test its functionality, using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to summarize order data points.

Throughout my work with Amino, I developed a comprehensive list of test cases to assess its various functionalities. When I encountered bugs or issues, I presented them to the team and provided detailed explanations. As I gained more experience, I began training the regional team in Ontario, facilitating a smooth transition from Excel to Amino. This involved teaching a team with diverse technical abilities how to navigate and use the application effectively. During the training sessions, we conducted User Acceptance Testing, gathering UI concerns, feedback, and input useful for change management specialists.

A significant portion of my work involved creating detailed documentation for troubleshooting and using Amino's features. These documents were then incorporated into a Copilot AI Bot to assist users with their questions about Amino. Testing the AI Bot's responses to prompts offered a valuable learning experience, especially in understanding how different writing formats influence the bot's ability to answer general "how-to" questions and its challenges with more vague, open-ended inquiries. My goal for the Amino Bot is to add more in-depth explanations about what Amino is, why it is important, and how to best approach it, including alternative terminology based on regional variations.

Nearing the end of my 8-month internship, I wanted to focus on being more of a leader in the project, as it had been a goal of mine from the first half. Hence, when the Project Manager had to be away, I practiced my leadership skills by presenting bugs and feature requests to our vendors, which partially involved relaying feedback from end users to them. In doing so, I became more aware of important deadlines such as going live with certain provinces.

This AI bot responds to a wide range of prompts by referencing source documentation, enabling it to effectively address user questions.

Above is a detailed Excel program used to manually keep track of varying factors of delivering feed to birds.

My Goals at Trouw Nutrition

I had set a list of goals both technical and non-technical as I began my internship, to ensure that I can learn as much as possible for the duration of my time at Trouw Nutrition. The following goals include seperate goals from both the first and last 4 months of my internship.

My goals included the following,

WT1: Goals & Reflection Flowchart

The folder icon contains a more detailed and older version of the following two work term goals. (Mobile users cannot see WT1 and WT2 goals as designed on smaller screen sizes. Please select folder icon.)

Where rectangle = goal, circle = plan of action, sqaure = reflection

Understand how to effectively use Amino

• 1. Took notes during meetings



• 2. Asked meaningful questions



• 3. Identified bugs/issues

My understanding of Amino has deepened as I continue working with it and M3. I’ve added numerous test cases, covering scenarios from API functionality to basic user setup, and promptly address any issues with my team. We haven’t progressed much in User Acceptance Testing yet, so I plan to focus more on that area moving forward.

Provide training for Amino

• 1. Teaching myself by pretending to teach a class



• 2. Connecting with professionals to learn current practices

Communicating Amino's complexities has become easier with experience. When training new users, I emphasize the transition from detailed Excel spreadsheets to a user-friendly application like Amino. This has been my primary focus, as I’ve conducted regular training sessions over the past few weeks.

Meeting project and personal deadlines

• 1. Checking my calendar regularly



• 2. Checking my emails regularly



• 3. Planning accordingly to set myself up for success

The goal is to Go Live by year-end, with training continuing throughout the fall. I set personal deadlines for each training session to stay on track, regularly updating my plan. This goal remains in progress as I focus on delivering effective training.

Reflect on different business practices and nuances between provinces

• 1. Observing different trends and practices between regions



• 2. Observing similarities to help simplify processes

We’ve identified key differences among provinces, such as Ontario’s need for veterinarian scripts in Amino, which aren’t required in Manitoba. I aim to deepen my understanding of these differences by providing training across various regions, including Alberta and British Columbia.

Understand business processes in manufacturing

• 1. Comparing the way feed is currently being delivered to flocks without Amino to when Amino will be used to do this work



• 2. Understanding the benefits of simplifying the process through technology

Collaborating with customer service has improved my understanding of their process for tracking deliveries and data. I now better connect their Excel-based workflow to Amino and plan to expand this knowledge across provinces to enhance my training sessions.

Conclusion

It’s very important to be aware of what goes on behind the scenes of getting food to consumers. It takes a lot of people across many professions to ensure quality food is sold. Using technology to optimize and enhance that process is the future of animal nutrition.

As a Project Coordinator, my biggest takeaway from my internship was seeing how things do not always go as planned, and the Amino team and I had to be agile in how we recovered from unmet goals to continue progress on a project many were passionate about!

Acknowledgments

Lastly, I wanted to acknowledge my Manager Blanca Villegas and the Preditive Ordering Project Manager Brad McIntyre for their continous support throughout both my work terms!

Business Systems Analyst

Sun Life Summer 2025 Intro

Over the summer of 2025, I had the incredible opportunity to work at Sun Life as a Business Systems Analyst Co-op student. In this role, I gained hands-on experience with two key areas of the AOS Contac Centre team, working with both the Pega and Salesforce platforms. Through this report, I hope to share insights from my experience about how transformative IT is for business.

What is Sun Life?

Sun Life is a global financial services company that puts client-first, so that they can achieve financial security and improve client health/wellness. Sun Life operates globally including Canada, US, Asia, as well as Europe. Technology at Sun Life is seeing many great modernization efforts to continue to remain competitive and provide clients a seamless experience with Sun Life products. With a 160 year history, Sun Life continues to be a company that is dedicated to improving the lives of many across the world.

Job Description

As a Business Systems Analyst within AOSQE at Sun Life I started my co-op by learning about the different parts of my team. I did so by booking one-one-ones with subject matter experts, which gave me solid background knowledge to understand some of the work that was being done on our projects. My team had a lot of great documentation to read through to further understand the history and current applications my team supports. Hence, I started off my work term by meeting members of the team as well as individual learning to understand what everyone is working on.

Next I slowly started to read through my work assignments and met with my mentors regularly to go through how I want to go about starting, updates, and feedback. My 3 major assignments included tracking 200+ Knowledge Base articles that belonged to my team, and retiring/updating them either by doing my own research or talking with SME’s/my mentor. I was also responsible for cleaning and reorganizing our SharePoint and OneNote documentation, being that my team supports many major applications and with that it can be difficult to maintain up-to-date information. Lastly, I was tasked to accurately map Configuration Items in ServiceNow for applications that my team support, specifically Salesforce. I created lists to map the different data points and to point out any inaccuracies, I would then present these to my mentor and director from whom I received lots of feedback which deepened my understanding of IT and Business best practices.

I spent the remainder of my time at Sun Life networking through coffee chats and co-op events at Sun life’s 1 York location. I connected with and built meaningful relationships with fellow co-ops as well as leaders within the company. Another highlight of my term was the Continuous Improvement challenge, which allows co-ops to present their innovative ideas to a panel of executive judges with their teams. My team and I worked throughout the term to present a new reporting tool to our existing desk-booking solution, which was perceived very well by the panel. That experience gave me a lot of confidence in myself, and allowed me to build even more relationships within Sun Life.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Sun life, and felt challenged yet supported in every opportunity/task I was a part of.

The above is my team and I presenting our Continuous Improvement pitch to the panel of judges and audience.

My Goals at Sun Life

The goals I wanted to work towards during my work term were a mix of getting a better understanding of how my team works, deliverables I would want to have done for my work assignments, and connecting with professionals across the different parts of Sun Life I may be interested in learning more about. The following was my guide I tried to stick by when approaching the above goals,

Click to see detailed goals and reflections.

Conclusion

It was an amazing opportunity to work for Sun Life, I got to feel fulfilled with both work and as a co-op student looking to explore different parts of the organization.

Being a Business Systems Analyst, I was able to learn from my collegues on how they approach a problem, the questions they ask, the steps they take for troubleshooting, and what they do with this new learned information. I will be taking these lessons and applying it to every role I take on in the future!

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge my managers Rob Morrison and Paul Jones for ensuring I had a fulfilling internship with a summer full of learning and opportunities. I want to give a huge shoutout to my mentors Andrew Choy and Karine Labelle for being so supportive for both work and any advise I seeked outside of my work with the team. Also wanted to acknowledge Danielle Prieur, Director of CRM & Contact Centre Application Operations, for deepining my knowledge of IT & Business. Lastly, a big thank you to the rest of the AOSQE team for all their support and guidance.