Final review...Grohe in Germany

The final stop on the European review tour was in Hemer, Germany home of Grohe AG. Hemer is a very small town (think Oxford) that is close to Dortmund and Dusseldorf. Grohe is a global leader in the production, marketing and sale of high end bathroom and kitchen fixtures. We sent a strong team to Germany with Melissa Tolson, Kay Ashbrock, and Zeynep Saglam taking on the challenge presented by Grohe.

With Grohe moving to SAP over the course of 2008, their supply chain leadership was in a need of a quality set of evaluation measures to ensure performance was in line with expectations and that SAP data was being leveraged effectively. The team quickly built strong relationships within the Grohe organization and were operating across global divisions within the first week. During the short life of their project, they evaluated over 80 potential measures working to find the right balance between corporate reporting needs and operational needs of the geographical divisions. Putting the final set of measures into standardized templates for ease of use and reporting gave their Grohe hosts a great deal more than expected.

The level of engagement by both the Miami MBA's and the Grohe hosts was impressive...as you can tell by how many people crowded into the final picture.

Good Morning Viet Nam!

Dateline, Ho Chi Minh City “Good Morning, Vietnam- Here Comes a major US Automobile Brand.” Alex Wowro, Brian Drew and Henry Wickham just completed an assignment in Ho Chi Minh City with Vietnam Partners, a US-based investment bank to pave the way for US automaker’s entrance into the Vietnamese market in December, 2008. The three worked with the VP management team and the auto-maker’s Manager-Director of Southeast Asia to create a strategy for the company to enter the Vietnam market with several brands in early December. Henry focused his efforts on the supply chain operations necessary to move the cars into the various market areas in Vietnam. Brian worked with several research companies and ad agencies to understand the consumer market and how best to position the brand. He then created a detailed marketing and promotion strategy for introducing the auto line to the new market. Alex supplied the financial muscle to understand the cost and profit implications associated with the product launch. His financial models included 58 spreadsheets to provide the necessary analysis of the financial implications to all parties involved in the product introduction. Breakeven analysis suggested the venture will be a successful one for all the parties. Both Brian and Alex are considering returning to Vietnam after graduation to continue their work on the product launch.

Team IMERYS Goes Green

IMERYS is a French company with a global presence in providing key raw materials to a variety of industries. Andy McMullen and Ryan Dillard were assigned to work with a Belgian based IMERYS sub that is focused on supplying kaolin to the global paper industry. Their project was to understand the impact and potential benefits of "green logistics" as it applies to the logistics of shipping kaolin from mines in Brazil, England, and the US to paper making companies around the world. In the first week Andy and Ryan get a first hand look at the business with a visit to the port of Antwerp.

The team was able to calculate the carbon footprint of the current logistics system and had a few ideas on where reduction opportunities could be found. The presentation to the company leadership was well done....and well received. Here is a pic of the team with Ewald Neves, VP of logistics.

Of course the highlight of the visit to Brussels was finding an old favorite restaurant near the "Grand Place" and introducing Ryan and Andy to the greatest desert of all time....Ille Flotant. A picture of this delicacy is below.

Taking on the Olympics in Beijing

The Havi team, based in Beijing, spent the month developing a marketing program for Havi Foods to capitalize on Havi’s work as the sole logistics provider for McDonalds and Aramark. Both companies deliver all the food to be consumed during the summer Olympics staged in Beijing in August. Tal Rosen, Marnie Banting and RJ Caldwell presented a marketing strategy to Havi Foods CEO Bill O’Biren and Marketing Director, Patrick Lin on June 19 based on their work over the past month (pic at right)

Havi Foods is the sole distribution arm for McDonalds in China – delivering frozen, cold and ambient temperature products to McDonald’s stores throughout China. Aramark is a foodservice company who was given the rights to supply food to Olympic participants and spectators along with McDonalds for the 2008 Olympic games. Havi’s job will be to deliver that food in a timely fashion from their distribution centers to all Olympic sites and venues, a challenging job when you consider the heat and humidity in Beijing in August and the need for many items to be delivered either frozen or cold. Havi will deliver over 70,000 meals per day over the course of the Olympic games. The Miami MBA team developed a marketing strategy for Havi Foods to use their Olympic experience as a way to open up future business opportunities with other food companies after the Olympic games. The student’s strategies and approaches were well received by Havi management and will be implemented once the games are over.

The MBA team enjoyed the opportunity to experience the challenges of such a huge food supply operation, particularly the role of the Chinese government in setting up regulations on how work was to be done. Extensive security has been implemented at all Havi sites, and a new bar code system was just put into place to ensure the proper tracking of all products being sent to the Olympic venues (a very challenging requirement since it was just established this week, and new bar codes labels must now be created for all products. Havi will have a major challenge as the Olympic games open since they will still be operating the entire supply chain operations for the McDonalds chain throughout China.

In addition to a challenging project, there was also the challenge of living and breathing in Beijing for over a month. These pics give an idea of the air quality.

Its All About the Bike

The next stop on the Euro tour was Rotterdam for Team Valvoline. Al Beauchamp and Padmaja Ranganathan had a very challenging business development analysis project for Valvoline Europe. Not only was the project complex, they had a challenging manager who helped them quickly understand how business was conducted in Holland....direct and to the point! The project content is confidential so I can't really share any details, but can report the Valvoline folks were very, very positive on the outcome of the analysis. Al and Padmaja, along with the help of Hong Wei back in Oxford, far exceeded their expectations of comprehending a large volume of information and then putting it into a format that will be useful in going forward. In fact their report out was so good, I forgot to take any pictures....so just imagine Al looking sharp with a bright orange tie, as he clearly used the national color to gain every advantage. Just to prove I made it to Rotterdam, the pic above is the view of the famous Erasmus bridge from my hotel room.

This team fully embraced the culture of their home country, with Al making multiple friends in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. He was even given a bike to use to get around better and fully experience the Dutch way of life. I'll leave the stories for Al to tell...but they are plentiful to be sure.

This is a Chinese Restaurant?

The combined teams from Grohe and Eaton celebrated the completion of their projects with a dinner in the Bund area of Shanghai. Looks like Tom is the right guy to pick the restaurant!

Bulgarian Soccer Star in Asia??

There appear to be rumors swirling about several Asian countries the past 6 weeks about a star soccer player from the Bulgarian national team who will sign autographs and have his picture taken with anyone interested. It is true that Bulgarian soccer players do have time on their hands since they are watching the Euro cup with the rest of us, but truth be told, this person is one of our MBA stars....Stefan Stanev who along with DJ Thongkoth and Antonia Zeller have been working to revamp Grohe AG Asian supply chain. Grohe is a global market leader in the production and marketing of premium sanitary fittings for bath and kitchen. Stefan, DJ and Antonia worked out of Grohe’s distribution center and factory operations in the Pudong area of Shanghai. The Grohe assignment reflects the truly global nature of the MBA consultancies: Grohe is a German company headquartered in Hemer, Germany, with operations in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia-Pacific, where the students were located. The manager they worked with is Chinese, and the head of Grohe’s operations in Shanghai is European. To add more international flavor, DJ was born in Laos, Stefan is from Bugaria, and Antoinia is German! The team spent their time with Grohe in Shanghai analyzing how Grohe could more effectively consolidate their Hong Kong operations into the supply chain operations in Shanghai. They analyzed Grohe’s shipments into Asia, and looked at such things as market demand, forecasting processes, material and information flow, order processing , IT systems and inventories.

They then recommended how Grohe could most effectively integrate Hong Kong into the Greater China supply chain. At the conclusion of their presentation, top management decided to adopt their recommendations and instructed managers to begin implementing the major directives from their study.

The picture on top shows the students with one of their Grohe hosts.

Sun in Barcelona

Tuesday was travel day to Barcelona to meet with Terri Sekel and Oxsana Dikhtiar who have been working at Checkpoint Systems. Checkpoint is an American company with global operations focused on retail security and information management. Their biggest product line is the theft detection devices you see at the entrance to most retails stores around the world. Terri and Oxsana worked in the city of Terrassa which is probably 15 miles inland from the sea and downtown Barcelona. Checkpoint placed them in a nice apartment (their place right above their head in this pic).

In Spain, dinner time is a bit later than we are used to as evidenced by the fact that we made it to the restaurant a few minutes after 9:00 and were the first people to arrive.

Terri and Oxsana had two projects with Checkpoint...an inventory reduction analysis and a review of customer returns, in both cases looking at business results in both Europe and North America. The common challange of different ERP systems, data quality, etc came into play much like with the Eaton-Europe team, but they still were able to uncover several opportunities for focused improvement. The office situation was very low key and friendly....with people from all over Europe working there. They claimed it had been cool and rainy...but looked pretty nice for my 24 hours in town! Here is a pic of Terri and Oxsana with Carlos Arias, their project manager.

Team Eaton in Shanghai

Eric Doan, Andrew Martin and Susan Gao presented their project analysis to Eaton Asia Pacific top management on Wednesday, June 18 in Shanghai. Eaton Corporation is a Cleveland-based industrial firm supplying equipment to the automotive, aerospace, electrical, hydraulics and truck industries all over the world. All three projects focused on improving a different aspect of Eaton’s supply chain operations throughout the Asia-Pacific region, which includes China, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, India, Taiwan and Australia. The projects reflected the complex nature of doing business in the Asia Pacific region, where Eaton works with many small, and very dispersed suppliers and customers. Andrew’s work focused on analyzing Eaton’s spending on packaging materials for all of their plants in China. He identified several opportunities for Eaton to reduce total expenditures on packaging, and presented an approach for rationalizing packaging purchases across the entire Asia Pacific region. His analysis reflected the frustrations of many large foreign companies who operate in the region: because the vast majority of suppliers are small and scattered all over the region, it is hard to obtain economies in buying and transporting supplies and materials. Susan analyzed Eaton’s supply chain network- factories, distribution centers and supplier locations – in an effort to make the network more efficient. Her analysis focused on reducing company inventories and transport costs in the region, and she proposed that Eaton consolidate distribution center operations into three locations: Australia, Shanghai and Singapore. Eric’s work focused on creating “scorecards” for management to use in the evaluation of supplier performance and internal Eaton factory operations. Eric’s project reflected the real world nature of the Miami MBA Global Consultancy assignments: during the course of his analysis of supplier quality ratings (defects per million parts shipped) he discovered a huge decline in quality for several Chinese suppliers in the month of May. The increase in defective parts was so drastic he questioned the validity of his data until he discovered that the suppliers were all located close to the major earthquake that struck China in May!

The Longest Day

Arrived in Geneva Monday morning after an all night flight from the states. Weather is cool and rainy, so the train ride up the lake to Morges was less than scenic. Switzerland should give a rebate on their high costs when you can't see the mountains! Speaking of Swiss prices....check out my spacious hotel room which I got at the bargain price of $160. Who needs a window when you can have sky lights instead!

After a quick clean-up, walked about 10 minutes to the Eaton Euro HQ for the student's presentations. Sarah, Andrea, and Josh each had separate supply chain projects and had already made their primary presentations last week when Eaton's CEO and COO where in town, so this was more of a wrap-up of their projects and experience. The Eaton folks were very pleased with the outcome and felt the team had made a solid contribution to a new and growing organization. The big plus was that they were introduced to the new supply chain concept of "banana boat shipping" by Josh.

Les Ball, Eaton's VP of SCM in Europe, presented each of the team with the classic Swiss gift....a Swatch watch (cheese doesn't travel well). Here is a pic of Les (bit of a Terry Nixon look a like!) and the team:

We finished with a nice dinner lakeside (Lac Leman) in Lausanne with a great view of.....fog and clouds, although we thought we saw a mountain once.

Finally have to share a picture of the lobby in the hotel that Team Eaton stayed....we need a couch like this in the new MBA lounge in Farmer Hall!

Off for Barcelona in search of the sun.

Brad

Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

Today is take off day for Europe starting a 7 day trek to hear 5 business reviews each in a different country. I will fully get to experience all of the transportation modes mentioned in title so should be interesting. The day by day itinerary is as follows:

Sunday/Monday...fly Cincinnati to Geneva. I will take the train from the airport to Morges (about 30 minutes up the lake) to get ready for the Team Eaton presentation

Monday...afternoon presentation at Eaton and then dinner with Josh, Sarah, & Andrea

Tuesday...train to the Zurich airport and then fly to Barcelona. I will take Terri and Oxana out for an early dinner (9:00 PM!!)

Wednesday...morning review at Checkpoint Systems and then a dash to the airport to catch a flight to Brussels. From Brussels I will drive to Rotterdam for dinner with Padmaja & Al

Thursday...business review with Ashland (Valvoline) and then drive back to Brussels for dinner with Ryan and Andy. Hoping to find my favorite place with the Isle de Flotant for dessert!

Friday...morning business review with IMERYS outside of Brussels and then a 300km drive to Hemer Germany for an afternoon review at Grohe. I will finish this slow day with dinner with Melissa, Zeynap, and Kay

Saturday...drive to the Cologne airport for the flight back home.

I will hopefully have pics and stories to share along the way.

Brad

Host Companies

Once again this year we have some great partner companies to work with our students. The companies and the locations for the projects are as follows:

Asia

• Havi Foods...Beijing, PRC
  
• Eaton Corporation...Shanghai, PRC
  
• Grohe...Shangai, PRC
  
• Viet Nam Partners...Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam
  

Europe

• Valvoline....Rotterdam, Netherlands
• IMERYS...Brussels, Belgium
  
• Grohe...Hemer, Germany (near Dortmund)
• Eaton Corporation...Lausanne, Switzerland
• Checkpoint Systems...Barcelona, Spain

Dr. Tom Speh

On the profile section of this blog you get a picture of me (Brad Bays) so thought I would introduce Tom as he plays such a key role with our Global Consultancy efforts. Tom is a global leader in the field of supply chain logistics, having received top awards for teaching, consulting, and serving over the past 40 years. I could write pages about Tom's accomplishments, but since many of you likely know him already, will just suggest to the others to check out this link:

http://www.fsb.muohio.edu/spotlights/080418160636%20Speh%20is%20Harrison%20winner



Tom will be traveling to Asia to participate in the final reviews for our 4 Asian teams over the next week while I travel to Europe. We will each post updates and pictures about how our students have been doing, hopefully reflecting the depth of the Global Consultancy experience

What is a Global Consultancy?

When Miami University's Farmer School of Business relaunched it's full time MBA Program in 2005 with an accelerated format, the Global Consultancy concept was born. Rather than study international business in a classroom, we send all of our MBA students to an overseas location for 5 weeks in May and June to complete a project with a corporate partner as a program capstone. Results in past years have exceeded expectations for both our students and our business partners. The companies are getting projects completed that they didn't have enough staff for and our students gain the understanding of living and working for an extended period in a different culture. More about our locations and partner companies this year in upcoming posts