Guten Morgen blog! Today is the day of our last site visit. Bitter sweet because we do not have to wear business casual from now on, but it finally set in that the program is ending. No worries though, I had my chocolate croissant and latte to start my day right. I was wearing my black pants, business shoes, and my new light blue blouse. Before I came, I bought a few new blouses for the site visits and I was excited to finally wear them.
Bus… again. However, this time we were leaving at 8:15 to get to SGL by 9:00 in the morning. I was not sure what to expect for our site visit at SGL. It was pleasantly surprising and went very well. I do not know much about carbon fiber, but I am glad that I was able to see the company and learn about how a company like SGL runs.
The tour was very interesting, similar to Continental I had expected to see one kind of plant but saw a something completely different from what I was expecting. It was cool to see that even though a company may be known for one product, they still might be working on something very innovative behind the scenes. Anyway, back to the site tour, I had no idea how carbon fiber was made. Seeing the plant, and how the entire line of carbon fiber was connected shocked me. What I found to be most interesting thing is how delicate carbon fiber is. If heated at too high of a temperature, the carbon fiber will burn. If carbon fiber starts to burn it could set the whole building on fire, it could be a very dangerous situation for the workers. Similar to Continental in another way is that the employees are mainly there for maintenance on the machines. They are not doing any actual work to produce the carbon fiber, but only to make sure the process goes smoothly. Also note-worthy, we did not wear any sort of safety-protection, other than Audi we wore safety gear for all of the site visits.
After learning about Carbon fiber for a while and the SGL group asking their questions, it was time to go. There was a slot of time elated for working on our upcoming presentations. Soon after getting back in Augsburg the Audi group, Me, Lauren, Ryan, and Joe, went for coffee and headed over to University. We had a layout of what we wanted to the project to look and flow like, but still there was much to be done. Me and Lauren are the business students in the group, so we took overview and SWOT analysis. Ryan and Joe, the engineers in the group, did the Research and Development, and Innovation slides. Once we got to working on the project we realized just how crucial the site visit was. The information we were presenting on was not something that you can research, you really have to ask someone who works at Audi what steps they are taking for the future of their company.
We worked for a while and then went to dinner. The university is a great place to sit down and be productive for a couple of hours, and then you can take the tram right to a restaurant. We went to Murdock’s for dinner.
