Today was our first day of official business visits and tours with companies in Cyprus. We started our day with a bus trip to the costal city of Limassol in which we visited Medochemie. We visited them in their headquarters and got a presentation from a few members of the company. They told us a lot of how their company works and the process of making medicines. One thing they do is quality assurance, which makes sure the suppliers they buy from are not giving them bad products and they products they produce are up to or above standards. They also have a set of regulations called GMP which is the Cypriot version of the FDA which makes sure the medicines are safe to give to people and stop the bad vaccines from being given out. Without this GMP there have been a history of tragedies where people will die from parts of a medicine that was given out with there being issues with how of quality the medicines are. They also gave us a structure of their supply chain. This includes a strategic plan/ budget planning which can take three to five years. Then they have a tactical section which includes sales and operations planning and this can take twelve to eighteen months. Then there is the operational section that includes master scheduling, detailed planning, order releasing, and execution and control, this can take two to three years. We were also given information that they sometimes will make medicine for companies like Pfizer and will create products that mimic and improve on other products. They then gave us a tour of their warehouse. This included two rooms of 1,100 pallet of products and supplies on shelves that rose to the roof. Their shelves had the technology to move to the left or right to optimize the amount of storage that can be put in the warehouses.
After the tour, we took the bus back to UNIC where we had lunch and were able to relax for a bit before representatives from Wargaming arrived to give a presentation. Wargaming has made multiple free online titles like “World of Tanks”, “World of Warships”, and “World of Warplanes”. “World of Tanks” is their most popular title as it was released in 2010 and has been holding players consistently since that time. The company has 3,500 employees and have 15 offices in many different regions in the world. In the US they focus their production on console games and in the Pacific region they focus more on the marketing section. From 2010-2022, they have gained 22 million players that play their games. The creation of their games starts from an idea someone comes up with. This idea gets greenlighted (which happens in every phase of production) and gets tested by a real life board game to test how fun this game is. After this stage the company invites players to come in and try the game to get some early feedback on how they are doing so far. After this feedback they use ‘feature creep’ which is them adding many more features to the game to improve the experience. Then comes the Alpha phase where the people working in the company play the game and see how it tests on the computer and how smoothly it runs under different stress tests. The Beta phase is next in which they release a part of the game to the public to play and get mass feedback on what is good and bad for the game. After this phase the game is ready for release in full on an online game market place to play.
