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:

Starting my Internship

The beginning of February signaled another milestone in my LGO journey:  the start of my 6-month internship at Sikorsky Helicopters in Stratford, CT.  Having moved out from Seattle last year with only three suitcases and a few shipped boxes, I was confident that I could make the  move to Connecticut with a couple of loads in the back of the Honda that I'm borrowing for the internship (thanks John!) .  The plan was to take everything that I could in the first trip , and leave the overflow stuff at Cynthia's until I could come back and retrieve it.  Well, after the 6th load, we realized that we needed a better plan.  What started with a Honda soon evolved to a Zip Van, and then this happened:

That's right, my "simple" move turned into quite the ordeal but eventually we found the right equipment for the job.  And this was without any furniture!

We eventually made it down to my new place in Shelton, CT just in time to pick up the keys to my apartment and get a few things moved in.  Luckily, my rented furniture from CORT arrived the previous day so I was all set.  That night we stumbled upon an amazing italian restaraunt in the next town over and had wonderfully authentic Napolitano pizza!

I signed the lease for my apartment without ever visiting, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the place.  The building is brand new, it has a great on-site gym, and from what I can tell about half of the residents work for Sikorsky.  The town itself is pretty quiet, with 40,000 people spread out over 32 square miles.  It's definitely the smallest town that I've ever lived in, but it looks like there are a lot of things to do outside once the weather gets a little warmer.  As it is, the whole town has about 2 feet of snow on all the sidewalks and trails.  Solution: Head to Boston or New York on the weekends!

The first weekend, I went back to Boston for some skiing, Malaysian food, and lot's of climbing.  The skiing was at Wachusett, which turns out to be one of the closest ski hills to Boston.  The snow was great, but we definitely weren't the only ones with the idea to ski and the lines turned out to be pretty miserable.  We ended up spending most of the day at the terrain park because there were no lines and I was once again able to confirm that I can't ski a rail .

On Saturday night, our resident LGO Malaysian Weng Hong hosted a great event to celebrate the Lunar New Year.  It was well attended by LGOs and it was great to see everyone and catch up over some delicious food!

On Sunday, Cynthia decided to celebrate her birthday by climbing 29 routes at the gym in one day.  She recruited a whole contingent of friends to work the belay and we had a great time helping her toward her goal (which she definitely achieved!).

The next weekend Cynthia came down to CT and we both headed down to New York form there.  This was my first time in NYC since 2000, so it was fun to be a complete tourist.  Our goal was to see a Broadway show by entering the ticket lotteries, and it turned out to be wildly successful.  Unknowingly, we had picked a day with off-and-on snow flurries and very few people wanted to wait outside, so the odds were pretty good in our favor of getting tickets.  We ended up seeing Kinky Boots and Newsies and they were both excellent.  We spent the rest of the weekend meeting up with friends and eating some great meals around Manhattan. 

Times Square

Rockefeller Center

As for the internship, things have gotten off to a bit of a slow start.  There have been three separate snowstorms in my first three weeks (each bringing at least 8 inches of snow), so I've missed at least one day of work each week due to weather. 

This sight has been all-too-common.  I'm definitely ready for Spring!

Sikorsky (part of the much larger UTC) is like a lot of big companies in that it takes a week to get a computer and another few weeks to get all the accounts working, so I'm just now getting set up with everything.  I'm working in the Supply Management group, so I've been spending the time meeting everyone and learning all about the process for government contracting.  We're still working to define my project for the internship, but it looks like there will be plenty to keep me busy! And it's pretty neat to be able to go downstairs and see Blackhawks being built (see this article for some pictures).

Trading planes for helicopters...for now! (Photo courtesy of vtolblog.com)

Domestic Plant Trek - Week 2

Week Two of the Domestic Plant Trek started with the flight from Seattle to Los Angeles.  This was the first time that most of us had seen temperatures over 60-degrees since about October, so needless to say we were all in good spirits.  The California sunshine recharged us and we all felt ready for another week of adventures.

Landing at LAX, looking out at the Hollywood sign

From LAX, we drove out to the Eastern suburb of Rancho Cucamunga.  After a morning of traveling, we decided to take a nice leisurely run around the town which ended up at an In-N-Out Burger.  By our calculations the run didn’t quite come out to calorie neutral, but oh well!  That evening a large group of us went to the Toby Keith Bar down the street and had a great time pretending we know how to line dance.

Jogging in Rancho Cucamunga

Enjoying the post-run meal at In-N-Out

The hotel was on Route 66!

On Monday morning, we headed to our next partner company: Amazon!  We had the incredible opportunity to tour a fulfillment center and see the amazing operations that make the whole system work.  If you want to learn more about what we saw, I’d highly recommend this clip from 60 Minutes.  Everyone at the site was very welcoming and we all left in awe of what they are able to achieve.

After a full day of touring the fulfillment center, we boarded a bus and headed out on a road-trip to Tucson.  Including a quick stop for dinner, the drive took just over 7 hours and we arrived around 11:00pm for what would turn out to be our shortest stop of the trip.  This was my first time back in Tucson in over a year, but unfortunately there wasn’t even enough time to get down to the U of A campus.  Soon after arriving at the hotel, we all crashed into a short bout of sleep.

Road trip to Tucson

Tuesday morning we woke up early and headed to the other side of the Airport to tour Raytheon Missile Systems.  I had toured the site back in 2007, but this experience gave me a completely different perspective.  We had a chance to see a lot of the automation that was being implemented into the factories, and also got to tour one of the final assembly lines.  And Raytheon definitely gets the award for best lunch (fajitas with all the fixings)!

As soon as the tour at Raytheon was over, we headed straight to the airport and boarded a flight to Dallas, then another one to get us to Austin.   

The only picture I took of Tucson was as we took off for Austin!

We landed in Austin after dark, but that didn’t stop some of us from heading out for a run to the downtown area.  The out-and-back route turned out to be 7 miles and it felt great to move a bit after so much traveling.

The Texas State House (Photo Credit: Weng Hong)

Our nocternal running group at the State House (Photo Credit: Weng Hong)

Wednesday morning we headed off to visit the corporate headquarters of Dell.  We had the chance to hear from some of their senior executives and meet with Michael Dell himself!  It was very interesting to hear his perspective of the company strategy now that he’s taken it private again.  As he put it, they are now the world’s largest start-up!  We also had a chance to tour one of their data centers and test out some of their prototype equipment.   All-in-all a very interesting experience; it certainly exposed me to more of the computing industry than I had seen before.

We had an early flight the next morning so rather than sleeping a few hours just to get up again, some of us made a pact to stay up all night.  And we almost made it.  We started the evening at Stubb’s BBQ, one of the “must eat” places in the city.  The food was marvelous (though we all ate way too much), and soon we were moving onto Rainey Street to experience some authentic Austin bars.  We found a nice place where we could listen to live music outside and were in no hurry to leave.  Eventually we moved on to 6^th Street and hopped around the bars until they started last call around 1:30.  At that point, we were getting hungry again and decided to do what any rational person would do at 1:30am on a Thursday morning in Austin: eat chicken and waffles!  We trekked down to the 24Diner and had ourselves a great meal.  By the time we finished, it was a little after 3:30 and we had run out of ideas and energy.  We threw in the towel and took cabs back to the hotel, in time to get a little over an hour of sleep before getting up and heading to the airport.

Stubb's BBQ!

Live music on Rainey St. (Photo credit: Weng Hong)

Flaming Shots on 6th St.

Chicken and Waffles at 3am?  Why Not!

Our next flight took us to the last destination of Plant Trek: Puerto Rico!  We arrived to a completely different climate of 80-degree temperatures and moderate humidity.  We checked into the Marriott Condado and enjoyed our first night in paradise.  Amgen held a reception for us on Thursday night and we had a chance to meet some of our hosts, but eventually the previous night caught up to me and I headed off to fall soundly asleep.

Landing in San Juan

View from the hotel!

Friday was our last “official” day of Plant Trek and we spent it touring Amgen’s facilities in Juncos.  It was interesting to compare this site with the one we had visited in Rhode Island over the summer, and our hosts were incredibly welcoming.  At the end of the day, we gathered for a group shot outside in the sunshine before boarding the bus back to the hotel.  And just like that, Plant Trek was over.  Now it was time for vacation!

A lot of gathered at a restaurant on Friday night for some authentic Puerto Rican food, and we completely overwhelmed the wait staff!  I guess they weren’t expecting 40+ people to show up for dinner at the same time, but they eventually sorted it all out.   

How to overwhelm a restaurant in PR (this was only half the table!)

On Saturday we checked out of the hotel and checked into an apartment down the street that we had found on AirBnB.  Before leaving the hotel, we sat down with Professor Shiba Shoji who had accompanied us on the whole trip and helped facilitate all of the plant debriefs.  Shobi told us his amazing life story and what he has seen as trends over the last 50+ years as a management guru and one of the worlds foremost leaders in quality and continuous improvement.  Words can't really do justice to the incredible insights we gained!

Chat with Prof. Shoji

We spent the rest of the day lazing on the beach and by the pool, enjoying staying in the same place for a change after 12 days of constant travel.  On Saturday night we headed down to Old San Juan for the San Sebastian Festival, which just happened to be the same weekend that we were there.  This is one of the largest celebrations of the year in Puerto Rico and it was quite a party!  I’m not sure how many people were downtown, but it was definitely in the tens of thousands and they were all enjoying the wonderful tropical weather and loud salsa music at one of the four main stages.  We ended up walking there and back, but had a great time experiencing the local scene!

San Sebastian Festival

Lots of people downtown for the festival!

Sunday and Monday were split between eating and lounging, but eventually we had to head back to reality.  So it was on Monday afternoon we went back to the airport and took our last two flights of the trip, arriving back in Boston just in time to be hammered by another snowstorm.

Yoga on the beach

 

Leaving PR and heading back to frozen Boston

Looking back at the last two weeks, it is truly hard to describe what an incredible experience it was to go on the Plant Trek.  As I mentioned before, it is one of the highlights of the LGO program and it exceeded even my wildest expectations.  Over the course of 16 days, we traveled over 9,000 miles on 11 flights, 6 different busses, and one crazy 14-hour minivan drive through the Polar Vortex.  Along the way, we visited seven partner companies and learned first-hand what it takes to operate in those seven unique industries.  We came out of the experience as an even closer class and with a great appreciation for operations.  Thank you LGO!

Domestic Plant Trek - Week 1

The Domestic Plant Trek (DPT) is one of the highlights of the LGO program, when we travel around the country with our whole class and visit the sites of our partner companies.  The trip gives us an opportunity to learn more about the partner companies, and to be able to see what we’ve been learning in class applied to real-life situations.  This year visited 7 different cities:

Detroit, Michigan (GM)

Portland, OR (Nike)

Seattle, WA (Boeing)

Los Angeles, CA (Amazon)

Tucson, AZ (Raytheon)

Austin, TX (Dell)

San Juan, PR (Amgen)

The itinerary for a very busy 12-day trip!

The trek got off to an interesting start when we woke up last Sunday to find out that our flight to Detroit was cancelled.  It turned out that they were having a major snowstorm and record low temperatures (later we found out it was called the Polar Vortex).  After scrambling most of the day to figure out how to move 50 people over 700 miles through winter conditions, we settled on a solution: minivans!  So on Sunday night, we all gathered at Logan Airport and hit the road in a fleet of 7 minivans, headed west.  Our summer team Five Alive re-united for the epic journey.  Our van drove until about 1:30am and then decided to rest for the night in central Pennsylvania.  Waking up the next day, we learned that two of the vans had pushed through the night and arrived in Detroit in time to make the GM tours.  Now that’s some hard-core trekking!  

As for us, we drove through the day on Monday, hitting snow in Toledo and crawling up to Detroit through a sea of semi-truck carnage.  By the time we made it to Detroit the sun was setting and road conditions were quickly getting worse, so we decided to head straight to the hotel and hunker down.  The temperature when we got there was -10F and the wind-chill was -34.  It was so cold that the windows in the hotel were frozen on the inside!  Unfortunately, we missed all of the GM events so I’ll have a wait a while longer before I see the inside of an auto plant (we’re talking about returning to Detroit over the summer for a make-up session).  Luckily our hotel was at the same site as GM’s headquarters, so we did manage to see a few cars.  Since going outside may have led to frostbite, we turned in pretty early to get some sleep.

We got used to this view after 14 hours of driving

The air was so cold that it turned some pretty amazing colors.  This was the view from the hotel.

We didn't leave Detroit empty-handed;

You know it's cold when the windows freeze from the inside!

On Tuesday we woke up early to drive the vans to the airport and head out for our next destination: Portland.  The flight connected through Denver, and we had some excitement when a delayed flight left us only 10 minutes to get to the next plane.  We made it to Portland by about mid-day and then headed straight to the Nike Store in Beaverton.  That worked out really well because afterwards my aunt picked Cynthia and me up from the store and headed to dinner with my Dad.  This was my first time back in Portland since May and it was wonderful to see everyone.

The carpet at PDX: A sure sign that I'm home!

Doing some shopping at the Nike Store in Beaverton

Tuesday was our day with Nike out in Beaverton.  We headed out to their corporate campus and heard about the company from several operations executives, got a tour of their campus, and visited their In-House Manufacturing (IHM) plant.  Even though I had grown up just a few miles away, this was my first time actually going on the campus.  The grounds were spectacular and it was amazing to see how everyone was in great shape (it helps that there are 2 gyms on site!).  Everywhere we went, there were mementos or tributes to famous athletes.  The original pairs of Air Jordon’s, the Amateur Cup that Tiger Woods won before turning pro, and the original waffle iron that was used on the prototype shoes in the 70’s were all there.

In the afternoon, we headed over to the IHM factory, where Nike builds all the air-bags for their shoe suppliers.  This was our first plant of the trek (for those of us who didn’t make it to GM), and it was definitely interesting to see how the bags were made. 

The entrance to Nike World Headquarters

Some original shoe prototypes...and the waffle iron that made it all possible!

Where it all started: selling shoes out of the back of a VW bus

Walking around the beautiful Nike campus

Thursday morning we headed up to Seattle for our next company: Boeing!  This was my first time back in Seattle since I left in May and it was great to get back and be able to show the company off to the whole LGO class.  We had some free time on Thursday afternoon to get some great Pho and run some errands around town.

Cynthia enjoying the "Seattle Sunshine" along the waterfront.

Friday was our day with Boeing and we had a full schedule all over Puget Sound.  We started in Renton and walked through the 737 production line.  I’ve been there several times before, but it is always impressive to see how efficiently they can make the planes (now up to 38 per month and soon headed to 42!).  From Renton we drove up to Everett and had lunch with several execs and LGO alums at the Future of Flight Museum.  Before lunch, we had a chance to wander around the museum and get some photo-ops in front of the 777 and 787 engines.

Checking out engines at the Future of Flight Museum in Everett

After lunch, we headed over to the Dreamliner Gallery and had a chance to see how airline customers get to configure their 787s, with options including galleys, seats, and lighting.  Boeing made a big push for standardization of the interior on the 787, and created a catalog of options that can be included in the purchase price.  This allows the airlines to get a great product, while limiting the costs of customization to Boeing.  Win-win.  

 

In the lobby of the Dreamliner Gallery

What seat do you want on your Dreamliner?  Come here and take your pick.

After the Gallery, we headed over to the Everett factory, which until a few months ago was the largest building in the world by volume.  We got a tour of the 787 and 777 manufacturing lines and then heard about all the Boeing internships that are being offered.  No matter how many times I go to that factory, it’s still impressive to stand next to the GE90 engines of a 777 and realize the scale of the products we build!  It was great to be able to share the factory with all of my classmates.

After a full day of touring, we had a pretty quiet evening catching up with some friends.  Then on Saturday we had the whole day off and spent it getting together with friends and going climbing.  I’m not sure when I’ll be in Seattle next, so I was really glad to be able to catch up with everyone while I was there.

On Sunday we headed down to Los Angeles for some warmer weather and the start of Week 2 of the Plant Trek!

On our way to sunny California, with a great view of Lake Tahoe (no, we weren't on a Boeing airplane *sigh*)