With a more business casual focus today, our day started with a visit to Medochemie, a Cyprian company that is responsible for research and development, as well as packaging drugs and medical products. Here I learned that the rigorous quality assurances and regulations set by the Good Manufacturing Practices (GPM, parallel of the FDA in the United States) make the process of getting a product from ideation to distribution much longer for medical products than products in other industries. This greatly impacts the supply chain, as every step of the process from raw materials to the distributors must meet the specified requirements of integrity and ethics to ensure that the product given to consumers is safe and effective to use. We also learned how uncertainties in recent times such as COVID-19 restrictions and the conflict in Ukraine, not only affects prices of intermediate steps of the supply chain, but also affect the employees in states of turmoil. After the presentation, we also toured their storage facility that utilized three different types of storage mechanisms in order to maximize the volume of product that can be stored. What I found to be most different about practices discussed in the Medochemie compared to those I am familiar with in the United States deals with accommodating the international nature of Europe. It seems to me that it much less common in Europe to have a company bound within one country’s borders, and with this comes complications of language barriers and transportation between countries that is generally not a concern for companies in the United States.

After lunch, we returned to the University of Nicosia to hear from Wargaming, an online gaming development company with its headquarters in Cyprus. This example of the supply chain was much different from that of Medochemie, as much of the process can be done without the help of third parties because of its virtual nature. The main third parties involved with getting their games from the ideation stage to players are investors, developing software, and online distributors. This ultimately leads to a generally quicker turnaround to the marketing stage. Not much with this company struck me as being much different than online game developers in the United States.

After seeing glimpses of the beautiful coast, I am looking forward to exploring more of Limassol tomorrow!