International Plant Trek Part 1: Shanghai!

Two weeks ago we left Boston to start what would turn out to be one of the best trips of my life: International Plant Trek 2014!  Like the Domestic Plant Trek in January, the goal was to visit the facilities of various partner companies.  Only this time, instead of circling the US, we were heading across the ocean to Shanghai and Seoul.  And as an added bonus, we were being hosted in Shanghai by the fantastic students of the CLGO program.  Now that I've had about a week to recover from the jet-lag, it's time to look back at all the fun times.

Day 1: Boston to Shanghai
The trip started early on a Friday morning, when we headed to Logan Airport for a short hop to Detroit and then a much longer hop to Shanghai.  We took off from Detroit just after 2pm on Friday and landed in Shanghai around 4pm on Saturday after flying for 14 hours and crossing the international date line.  The long-haul flight was on a relatively new 777-200LR, but I definitely didn't sleep for more than about 2 hours total.

Settling in for the long-haul flight (DTW-PVG)

Once we landed in Shanghai and cleared through the very efficient customs process, we boarded the Shanghai Maglev train, which is the first commercially operated high-speed magnetic-levitation train.  The train tops out at 431 km/h (268mph), but we rode it during a non-peak time, meaning it was throttled back to 301 km/h (187 mph).  Still a pretty exciting ride!

Boarding the Maglev Train

Unfortunately, the Maglev doesn't actually make it all the way to the downtown area of Shanghai, so we had to cover the last few miles via and extremely overpriced taxi (turns out we were totally swindled).  After a quick stop at the hotel to drop our bags, we headed to a welcome dinner hosted by the CLGO students.  They had a full spread of wonderful food prepared for us and even arranged for a cultural performance. In total, there were 48 of us on the trek, plus all the CLGO students who hosted us in Shanghai.  I hadn't seen most of the LGOs since I left to start my internship in February, so it was like a reunion of sorts.  It just happened to be a reunion about 8000 miles away from the MIT campus!

Welcome Dinner

Day 2: Shanghai Tour

We spent the next day touring around Shanghai and seeing some of the local sights.  The weather turned out to be impeccable and the tours gave us a great overview of the rapidly-growing city.  Our first stop was the Oriental Pearl Tower for a birds-eye view of the city. 

Oriental Pearl Tower

From 860ft above the city, we learned a startling statistic about the scale of Shanghai: there are now over 4,000 buildings that are taller than 30 stories!  Four Thousand!!  We saw a lot of them from the tower, but this is just a small fraction of the vast expanse of the city. 

View from the top of the OP Tower, looking across the river

Besides the view out the windows, there was also a glass-bottomed floor in tower that gave us a look straight DOWN 860 feet!  Definitely a unique perspective on the world!

Looking straight down from the OP Tower

Our next stop was at the China Pavilion, which was built for the 2012 World Expo and exists today as an art museum.  Before going in, we took the chance to take a classic shot: M-I-T L-G-O!

LGOs in front of the China Pavilion

After a delicious lunch and a walk along Nanjing Road, we made a quick stop at a tourist-focused silk "factory" and showroom.  For a group of operations nerds, it was actually pretty fascinating to see the process.  Somehow I never realized that silk comes from the individual cocoons of silk worms, but now it makes a lot more sense.  Shown below is the machine that extracts the individual fibers from the cocoons.

Silk fiber extraction

From there, we headed to the Yu Garden for a tour and some shopping.  The garden was built in the late 16th century and has since been destroyed and rebuilt several times throughout the last 4 centuries.  For being right in the heart of Shanghai, it sure felt like a different world inside the walls of the garden.

View inside the Yu Garden

Shopping at the Yuyuan Tourist Mart

The last event of the tour was a dinner and boat cruise along the downtown area by night.  The whole downtown area is lit up brightly once the sun sets and it is quite a spectacular sight.

View of downtown, before boarding the boat cruise

Shanghai by night

Day 3: Cross-Cultural Lecture and Sandisk Tour

The third day of the trip started with a walk to the SJTU campus and a lecture by Don about the Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) research effort.  It was interesting to experience the lecture with the CLGO students and hear some of their perspectives on global manufacturing.  Particularly interesting was how the dynamic of labor costs and transportation costs is shifting such that it only makes business sense to offload certain types of products overseas (i.e. high value-density products).  Other products make a lot more sense to produce closer to the point of consumption.

Don lecturing at SJTU

After a quick lunch, we boarded a bus and headed out to our first official site visit of the trip: SanDisk.  This particular site made incredibly high volumes of flash memory products including SD cards and SSD drives.  I had never been inside a microchip manufacturing facility before, and I was completely blown away by the level of automation and the precision that is required for making the products that we all use everyday.  The facility was clean, modern, and very impressive.  One interesting aspect was that the process is so technical that even the front-line workers have some form of advanced education to qualify them for the job.  SanDisk also gets the prize for best snacks!

After the SanDisk tour, we headed back to Shanghai for an evening reception, dinner, and late-night karaoke.  The karaoke in Shanghai was like nothing I have ever experienced before.  Rather than the US-style of having a large room full of strangers singing awkwardly, we had our own private room in which to sing awkwardly.  Needless to say, it was a ton of fun!

Lat-nigh karaoke

Day 4: Pegatron and Caterpillar

The fourth day of the trip started with a long bus ride out to the industrial city of Hangzhou on the West side of Shanghai.  Once there we visited the manufacturing facility of Pegatron, a supplier to Dell.  This was quite a different facility than the one we had seen at SanDisk, in that most of the operations were manual labor jobs involving the assembly of computer components.  Rather than focusing on automation, this facility was very agile, with very little capital that would have to be reconfigured to assemble different types of products.  It was definitely an eye-opening experience to see how most consumer electronics are assembled.

From Pegatron, we headed to the Huzhou facility of Caterpillar.  Since we didn't visit CAT on our domestic plant trek, this was my first chance to see the heavy steel up close.  The facility itself was very impressive, feeling like a US factory that just happened to be in China.  The plant manufactured front-end loaders and autograders, and exported almost 100% of them (they have other facilities that build for the China market).  Since all my manufacturing experience has been in the aerospace industry, it was fun to see a product where weight isn't such a design factor.  This equipment is built out of solid steel and meant to do heavy lifting!

Outside the CAT facility in Huzhou

From CAT, we headed to a final dinner again hosted by the CLGO students.  This particular restaurant highlighted food from the Western reaches of China, which begins to resemble food from the Middle East.  We enjoyed quite the feast, capped by roasted whole lamb (x2!). 

Patty doing the honors of carving the roast lamb

As a closing thank-you, some of the LGOs performed a musical number including the "LGO Blues" to the CLGOs.  It was quite a performance!

LGOs singing the blues

At this point, we had to bid adeu to our gracious CLGO hosts and leave Shanghai for our second stop of the trip: Seoul.  We weren't in Shanghai for very long, but the time spent was well used and I can't thank the CLGOs enough for showing us around their amazing city.  We're looking forward to seeing everyone again when they visit MIT this summer!

Departing Shanghai.  Until we meet again.

P.S. In case you've been wondering why Cynthia isn't in any of these pictures, that's because she was in Cape Town, South Africa for a different uniquely-MIT experience: Global Health Lab.  She and her team spent two weeks at a community health center down there working to apply some operations theory to improving the ability of the pharmacy to service customers.  More on that to come later, but here are a few teaser shots: