Our first company visit was with Medochemie in Limassol. Medochemie is a pharmaceutical company that develops and manufactures generic drug products. Most of their factories are located in Cyprus, but they also have some in the Netherlands and Vietnam. They have 1500 employees, and their revenue is 300 million euros. Quality assurance is an important factor in Medochemie’s operations. They must check every aspect of the products: materials, processing, equipment, manufacturing, operators, environment, testing, storage, packaging, and dispatch. They use the guidelines provided by the government, called GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices), which give strict regulations for each of the previously mentioned aspects.

Much of Medochemie’s work in the supply chain has to do with long term planning to make decisions based on budget, sales, and operations. This planning is used to create scheduling, plan for required materials, and plan for capacity requirements. Following this is order releasing and execution. It was very interesting to hear how they handled different challenges in the past few years. For example, while they did struggle with dispatch of products, they kept working through the COVID-19 pandemic without shutting down operations. More recently, they have been affected by the crisis in Ukraine. They have faced challenges with their offices in the area as well as the affect it has had on demand from customers.

Our second company visit was with Wargaming. They have 3500 employees and offices in 15 different countries. They focus on online multi-player games, but they also make mobile, console, and PC games as well. There are 200 million registered players of their games. We were given the details of the process turning an idea for a game into a finished product. First, there are several questions that must be answered: What is the market? Does it fit the brand? Do they have the capacity to build it? What is the budget? Once they have the answers to these questions, they can move onto several stages of prototyping that start abstract and gradually add more details. Once the product is made, money is put into ads and marketing for the game. While they are working to develop some new games, their major focus right now is adding more content to existing games.