Today, we visited Medochemie and Columbia Shipmanagement Company. A large and important part of the supply chain that Medochemie performs is quality assurance. The company’s goal is to produce affordable and quality medicine for everyone and has 630 product combinations, 13 manufacturing plants, and operations in 106 countries. This is an extremely important component of the supply chain of medicine because if there were issues in a batch, the consequences could be deadly. For similar reasons, another essential part of their supply chain is Research and Development. On the more order filling and production side of the business, the company strives to meet their customer’s needs “on time and in full”, or OTIF. Part of doing this is optimizing operational production, which means working to figure out how much to produce, and when in order to minimize costs such as inventory, as well as maximize OTIF orders. They also touched on forecasting, something we learned about on this trip. Their demand forecasting is primarily human and does not implement machine learning. However, they said they are interested in investing in new and more accurate forms of forecasting. It is interesting to observe how these groundbreaking technologies such as AI and machine learning are being integrated into real businesses. 

The picture I included is on Medochemie’s on-site warehouse, which was fairly large. They had a semi-automated system in the main part of the warehouse where they could separate the columns of boxes as they needed to access them. This saved a lot of space because they could be nested together when the rows are not needed to be accessible.

Next, we visited Columbia Shipmanagement. They defined “shipmanagement” to us as “keeping multi-million dollar assets at sea”, whether that be oil ships, container ships, etc. They provide services such as maintaining the ship’s engines, facilitating crew changes, and giving instructions for just about everything a vessel might need. As they hold the #5 spot of ship management companies in the world, they stressed their “reputation for operational excellence”. I would imagine that in such a fast-paced industry, this is something that is extremely important to clients. One thing they do that stood out to me as someone studying engineering is the monitoring of the building of vessels from point A to Z. This service requires all types of engineers, and I would assume it could Include Industrial engineers to handle the logistics and find ways to operate more efficiently. 

Overall, today was very educational, and we learned a lot about how supply chains are different for companies in different sectors.