China - Day 9

Today was our first official plant tour for the 2010 International Plant Trek and the company was Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC).  We could not take any photos inside and I have not gotten a copy of the group yet but I did snap a few photos in the lobby.

Unfortunately, the actual plant tour was kind of weak.  The tour was just a quick walk through final assembly and we went as one big group of 70.  The speakers would make comments in Chinese and one of the CLFM students would translate.  Both speakers would speak into a microphone which broadcast out of the portable speakers that they were carrying, but overall it was difficult to hear and not a very thorough tour.  Overall it lasted maybe 30 minutes.  To be fair to SAIC this is not too different from the tours we had on some of the international plant tours last year.  It is often difficult to get companies to understand that we are VERY interested in operations and want a thorough tour, not the quick “look at my pretty factory” tour that you give to executives.  Its fantastic that they opened their doors to us, I just wish we could have had more time on the floor.

The one thing I saw that I really liked was a movable floor unit for adding the motor into the car.  At a number of the car plants that I have toured the cars either move slowly down the assembly line and the floor where the operators stand move with the cars (so it is stable as they work) or the cars move forward and stop, the operators work, and then they move again.  Here they had a slow moving line without a moving floor.  Instead, they had a robot controlled (I believe it followed a magnetic strip on the floor) platform that moved under the car, lifted the motor into the car (allowing the operators to attach the motor to the car) and then it moved out of the assembly line after which another motor was added to the platform.  What I love about this setup is the flexibility.  If you build a large crane arm to load motors into the car, you can never change where that step happens or the type of motor/car combination.  With this mobile platform, if you wanted to change the location or style you just change platforms.  Beautiful!

After the tour we headed to the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) campus (where the CLFMs go).  My CLFM hosts and I visited the recreation area to play a little badminton.  On Sunday, I was talking a little table tennis smack to some of the Chinese students when we were discussing which sports we played.  I was fully aware that they would destroy me, but everyone loves a little fun competition.  Unfortunately, they did not have paddles at the school so we settled on badminton.  It was fun either way.  The last time I played badminton I must have been 13 years old and it was a pretty casual game.  This is not the way they play.  Apparently, the objective of badminton is to hit the birdie as hard as you can…which gets quite tiring after a while.

• Bottom right: George drew me a map of how to get back to the hotel.

After I got back to the hotel I met up with some people who were on their way to the market to pickup their custom made suits and shirts and decided to tag along so I could see the market. It was amazing!  They all purchased clothes from a building that was three stories tall and each story had ~100 booths that all made custom tailored clothes.  If you did not like the price at one booth, you walked one booth over and ordered the exact same thing.  Depending on the quality of material you wanted, you can get a suit for 500 Rambos (the word we use instead of RMB which you always see and which actually stands for renmimbi...and could also be abbreviated CYN for Chinese yuan) or $74 and shirts were 80 Rambos or $12.  The shirts were fun too, because they had 10+ options for the collars, buttons, cuffs, cut, etc. and you could mix and match materials and styles.  I kind of wish I had gone shopping, but I would have had to sacrifice my first day there and I wanted to see the sights more.  Pretty cool either way.

After everyone settled their clothes fittings (checking the fit of suits with one sleeve or pants that were not quite finished) we headed to dinner.  We went to this large mall and ate traditional Chinese food in a room that overlooked the river.  I love/hate the negotiating in China...because while it is fun to watch it can be tiring.  When we walked into the restaurant we were told that we could only sit in the window room if we spent 1500 Rambos on our food bill.  We said sure because that’s about $22 a person (10 person group).  Once we sat down, we discovered that we could not even order enough food to get to 1500 Rambos.  I ordered two of everything I wanted (as did others) and when we tallied it up we were at about 650 Rambos.  After our CLFM students yelled back and forth with the staff they agreed to include the alcohol on our 1500 minimum bill (of course the finance nerds in group debated whether the restaurant held a call or a put option, these are stock trading terms, over us).  When the final bill came it was about 1300 Rambos and they let us leave at 1300 instead of 1500 so we did not have to order dessert that we had no intention of eating (why would you have 5 star dessert when there are McDonald's McFlurrys just one floor below?)