Austin, TX: Flextronics/Cisco

Monday, January 7

We arrived at the Flextronics facility around 8:30 and were greeted by Cisco and Flextronics employees to begin the first tour of our trip. After hearing from a number of managers on the background of Cisco and Flextronics as well as the unique partnership the two corporations share, we were broken up into 8 small groups and were given a very thorough tour of the massive facility where they produce many routers and servers such as the CRS-1 which a super server that could transfer the entire contents of The Library of Congress in just 4.6 seconds as well as connect 3 billion phone calls a second – this is due to the fact that the unit can process 1.2 TBPS (yup, that is Terra bytes!). We definitely felt that the red carpet was rolled out for us and we had a great time learning all about the manufacturing process of these amazing machines.

After our visit, we left Flextronics and Cisco and went to The County Line BBQ to have a dinner hosted by Dell. We arrived about an hour before the Dell employees so we all headed to the beautiful patio behind the restaurant that bordered a lazy river that meandered by the restaurant. When Dell arrived, dinner was served and we all ate like kings. Many among us enjoyed the local brew, Shiner Boch – hope to enjoy it again sometime soon. After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and then once again out to see 6^th St. It was interesting being back on 6^th St. The last time that I was in town was roughly 6 years ago on a cross-country road trip. My arrival in Austin on the road trip coincided with the opening night of the SXSW Festival – a truly amazing time in Austin. 6^th St during that time was blocked off and packed end to end with thousands and thousands of people. This latest visit lacked the thousands of people, but there was still a very healthy night life (especially for a Monday night!) that was a lot of fun.

Austin, TX: Cisco/Flextronics

Sunday, January 6

The LFM class of 2009 departed for our two week domestic plant tour today. The first leg of our trip brought us from Boston to Austin, TX in order to visit Cisco, Flextronics and Dell. We arrived in Austin on Sunday afternoon and went in search of lunch prior to any required meetings. Most of us found some great BBQ at Stubb's BBQ on Red River Avenue which was just around the corner from our hotel. Talk about some good food! We had some delicious pulled pork sandwiches and I had the mashed yams which were excellent! If you make it to Austin, Stubb’s is one of the many famous BBQ joints in town and definitely deserves a visit. After lunch we had our first meeting with Prof. Shoji Shiba who learned about lean manufacturing from Deming himself and has had a very distinguished career helping manufacturing companies around the world become better at what they do. We are very privileged, as were the previous 20 LFM classes, to have him join us and teach us to see problem areas in the plants and companies that we will visit. Through an introductory lecture, Prof Shiba taught us his 7 key points for observing the invisible and unknown as well as the visible proof of corporate pros and cons. In brief, his 7 key points were to 1) observe details, 2) observe the periphery, 3) observe the unusual, 4) observe what is missing, 5) observe symbols, 6) observe shadows (try to see beyond your mental barriers), and finally, 7) observe comparisons. I hope to gain a lot of insight from Prof. Shiba during this tour on these ideas as well as to start to see the manufacturing facilities as he sees them.

After our lecture, we headed out to The Main Event where Cisco and Flextronics were hosting us for the evening. If you have ever been to Dave & Buster’s or Chuck-E-Cheese, you get a general sense of The Main Event. They have a bunch of arcade games, bowling alleys, a mini-golf course, a rock-climbing facility and a laser tag arena. A competition of bowling, arcades and laser tag kept our hosts and us very busy for the entirety of the evening with the laser tag being our favorite. Definitely a lot of fun was had by all! As the evening ended, we returned to our hotel and most of the class headed down to 6^th Street to see the local Austin nightlife for the rest of the night and you can check out Sean’s blog to see some of the action photos from the night (definitely check out the photo of the flaming Dr. Pepper’s that they had).

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

Hope that you all had a great and safe end to 2007 and an awesome beginning to 2008!
Take care and more later...

Happy Holidays!

So Alicia and I had a great holiday weekend in Boston. We had four whole days together - the first time in 6 months! We had a great time spending our time together and having our first Christmas alone. Though we missed our families, we had a very merry Christmas.

On Saturday, Alicia and I went to see the Christmas Revels at the Sanders Theatre on Harvard's Campus. A great Christmas show that celebrated the winter solstice through folk stories and songs from the Baltic region. A very memorable time for both of us and something that we will definitely do next year as well.

Christmas Eve we took a long walk around Boston through Boston Common and down Newbury St. The city was pretty deserted, but we didn't mind. There was a church playing Christmas carols on their bells that created a very pleasant holiday experience.

Hope that you all had wonderful holidays and have a Happy New Year!
More later....

Almost Done and Plant Trek Prep!

So I am almost finished with my Fall semester...just one more exam - Accounting - on Wednesday and I am officially on Winter Vacation. Whew! At that point, I will have finished half of my academic work at MIT. Hard to believe, but true. I've already bid on my Spring courses and will find out next Wednesday what classes I'll be able to take. I will admit to any potential students it is REALLY hard to narrow down the classes that you will want to take while here. It is amazing how every class you hear about is one that you add to your list for consideration. I think that I have a pretty good line up for classes but will fill you in next week on that information.

As far as Plant Tour goes, here is all the information about it that I know. Plant Tour is an LFM-defining event. The entire class (all 47 of us) head out for two weeks during the month of January to travel across the country visiting our partner companies manufacturing facilities.

Our itinerary for the trip is as follows:
Jan 6th - 8th: Austin, TX - Visiting Cisco/Flextronics/Dell
Jan 9th: Reno, NV - Amazon
Jan 10th - 13th: Seattle, WA - Boeing
Jan 14th: Milwaukee, WI - Harley-Davidson
Jan 15th: Chicago, IL - Honeywell
Jan 16th - 19th: Detroit, MI - GM, American Axle, possibly Ford and the North American Auto Show

We are all trying to get ready for our travels home (be they domestic or foreign) for Christmas and then again for our trip. It is a lot of work putting the whole trip together and all the credit goes to my classmates on the Plant Tour Committee. They have done a wonderful job. I'll keep you updated on our trip as best I can. It should be an amazing life experience so I hope that I do it justice.
More later...

I Forgot! The Mandarin Oriental Hotel Construction Tour

So I totally forgot to post about the tour that the Real Estate Club set up. I am not in the Real Estate Club, but they opened up the tour to non-members as well (which is nice) so I got to join them on a tour of the new Boston Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It is still under construction (opening date is June 20th or so) so we all donned hardhats and got to walk around the construction! I really like seeing how things are put together so this was a great trip for me. We were able to tour the mixed use facility and got to see the hotel floors, the condo floors and the penthouse...a 6,000 sq. ft. unfinished condo that went for $14 million for the raw space. The future owner is supposedly planning to drop another $5 million to finish the condo. Talk about great location though: right next to the Prudential Center, Newbury Street right next door, views of The Charles, Fenway and all of Boston from the floor to ceiling windows - beautiful. When we visited it was getting late so we got to see the sun setting over Boston as we were in the penthouse. Let me just tell you that the future owner will have a lot of great views! Just wanted to drop another line before exam week kicks in!
More later...

FINALS!!!

Well, we're not quite to Finals yet, but we are winding down our semester. We've been busy with final presentations and tying up the loose ends of all those semester projects and papers. Its been quite a stressful couple of weeks, but we are all looking forward to our vacations (though ours is cut short by the Plant Trek in January). We'll see how that goes. Some of my fellow LFM's have been doing a great job setting up our itinerary and creating interesting and exciting, not to mention entertaining, events for us on our two week trip! I'll try and post and upload some photos from our trip so you can get an insider's view. Hope that you are all doing well!
Take care and more later...