Today was the first of our various company meetings! Once we got up early and got some breakfast, it was time to leave for Limassol at 8am to meet with Medochemie, then after we went back to UNIC to meet with Wargaming. Today was a pretty long day but it was packed with a lot of valuable information from each company. for each company, I tried to mainly focus on their supply chain positions.

Medochemie is a much larger distributor than I thought. Their own supply chain has a very complex supply chain, consisting of business planning, sales and operations planning, master scheduling, materials planning, detailed scheduling, capacity and supply planning, order releasing, and execution and control. What really peaked my interest was how they forecasted the customers and demand, and when I asked, they said that the forecast weekly and every 3 months. They use math based formulas derived from tips from consumers and demand/requests from hospitals in order to accurately predict necessary output to their consumers. After our meeting, we toured their warehouse, and it was such a large area with a ton of boxes containing their products, stacked all the way up to the ceiling.

When the tour was over, we took a bus over to UNIC to grab lunch and meet with Wargaming. They’re located in Cyprus because they’re in the center of everything here, and the taxes are low here. Their operations seemed a little confusing, but I learned that they either make prototypes themselves or hire another company to do it (each costs millions of dollars), and they have to market their product differently in different geographical areas. For example, they prioritize a strong manga/storyline in Asia and they prioritize the history of world wars when marketing in Europe. I also learned that they found it more profitable to offer a free game with in game purchases than to offer a game that initially costs money to play.

Today was very informational and I’m looking forward to our other company meetings!