Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Help! I'm out of nut goodies!

Business:


ABB Robotics is the first company visit today.  A company that our professor, J.J. has worked at.  He actually worked for the company for eleven years.  Bertil Thorvaldsson was our presenter and was actually J.J.'s boss at ABB.  Bertil is the product manager at ABB.  As his children explain his position, he sits reading papers and drinking coffee.  It is very interesting with his children.  He has three children who all were born in different countries and all live in different countries than the one they were born in.  His daughter was born in Sweden and lives in America, his one son was born in American and lives in Sweden, and his other son was born in Germany and lives in South Africa.  Bertil used to live in America.  He lived there for about twelve years.  He claims that his favorite thing about America is Taco Bell.  Every time he comes to America he goes straight to Taco Bell and gets a bean burrito, chili cheese burrito, and a doctor pepper.  He also loves these nut goodies that are only found at Menards.  Bertil once told a colleague about them and warned them that they are addicting.  His colleague bought them anyway not really believing Bertil and a few
weeks later Bertil receives an email saying, "Help! I'm out of nut goodies!"

Going back to more of the business and what Bertil does.  He originally started as a developer in 1976.  Then was in R&D for awhile, then marketing, and some work in customer service.  Due to his background in almost every major part of the company besides on the manufacturing floor he was able to get the position as product manager.  Product manager deals with about every single department in the business,  his background with the company allowed him to apply.  He loves his new position and finds it to be a "cool job."  The one thing that he finds most challenging about his position is the fact that he needs to "deal with the fact that there is not enough time."  Meaning that he cannot be in multiple places at once and needs to work with the different departments at different times.  The one thing that he misses from his other positions is having a team.  In his new position it is pretty much only him.  In his previous positions he was able to have team members in all different departments and would work together to get a task done.

Bertil brough up a brilliant point about his position.  He believes in being a leader, not a manger. 
Being a manager means that you use threats and rewards to get people to do what you want them to do.  A leader conveniences people and gets them to want to do things.  Bertil works as a leader.  This gave him some troubles when opening a factory in India.  The people of India work with managers.  They work by someone telling them instead of some trying to convenience them.  They did not like having the freedom.  This is based solely on the culture of India than the people that were hired.

ABB is big in Europe, fairly decent sized in America, and small in Asia.  They are working to grow the presence of ABB in Asia.  The headquarters for ABB was not always in Sweden.  The headquarters was once in Shanghai.  Shanghai does have the largest factory of all the factories of ABB.

When going back to India.  Bertil was the master mind of opening a factory there.  As he looked at it, they had the same education, the same skills, and they would work for a fifth of the salary than Swedes.  He was thinking it was the perfect opportunity.  The only issue though is that he was running that factory the same way as all his other factories.  Bertil forgot to add into the equation of their culture.  Within the first year of opening the factory most of the people hired quit.  Due to this difference in culture most of the businesses have been pulling out of India, but Bertil is determined.  He plans on going to India soon to work with the people there some more and find some equal ground.

J.J. brought up the question of what Bertil thought was the ideal student coming out of college to ABB was.  He described it as being a marketing and accounting major and having some sort of
knowledge of the organizational behavior.  Most be a good thing that I was not thinking about applying at ABB since I have neither of those majors and have not had some studies in organizational behavior.  Organizational behavior does sound very interesting.  I think that is due to the fact that organizational behavior has something to do with HR.  HR is human resources and is a field that I was looking into.  That or PR, public relations.  I enjoy working on relationships with people.  Not only within the company, but also outside the company.  I believe that the relationships are the most important part of a successful business.  Without them there is not business.

The motto of ABB seems to be, "make the customer's life easier."  The point of the robots is to do demanding tasks for the customer at a faster pace and with ease.  There are four parts to the process.  Programming deals with giving the robots directions.  To do this there is the program Robostudio.  When talking about Robotstudio.  Bertil actually came up with that concept.  Another reason of why he is in the position that he is.  He added to a lot of the success that ABB has.  Dealing on the commission side there are these tablets that can connect to all different parts of the robot to inform people of any issues and of productivity by that robot.  Operation is pretty much everything that goes into creating the robot and setting up the robot.  Supervision is similar to commission.  In any location outside the factory the person in charge can check on the status of the robot.  Right before bed the manager can quick look at their phone and get an update.

There is this major robot show that happens once a year.  IREX brings all the competitors together and try to sell their product as better than the others.  From what I saw of the pictures all the products from each competitor is very similar.  This makes things difficult for having a competitive edge.  Some company needs to stand out from the rest.  ABB does a great job of doing just that. 

There is a new robot that is launching in March.  They named this robot YuMi.  I found it funny that they have gone through multiple different names for this robot.  A couple of the names were Messe and Frida.  Apparently, the name YuMi translates into some slang word of Japanese.  Bertil would not tell us what the translation was, but in all reality I do not want to know.  That happens sometimes and that is why there are multiple items with names that came from somewhere else.  I believe that YuMi will be very popular and profitable.

At the end I asked Bertil which country he enjoyed working in the most.  I do not believe he could truly pick one.  Bertil likes Sweden because that is where his roots are.  He enjoyed living and working in America because it was a good place to raise a family.  Bertil also enjoyed Germany because it had such a huge contrast from what he was used to.  Germany has an old style language, but is still very modern life.  He also talking about how Sweden spends more time on the planning portion and because of that they can spend less time with execution because there will be less mistakes.  It is completely opposite in America.

Stylt Trampoli is in the hospitality industry.  They deal with web development, furniture design, and pretty much the design of everything.  Stylt strongly believes in first impressions and the designs that they have done so far have great first impressions.  From what we were told they try to use traditional market communications.  Which I can definitely see because they do not really market themselves.  They market through the projects that they do and word of mouth.  I like this train of thought because there have been so many studies on how word of mouth is such a better way to market than anything else because people trust those that they know.

Par Svensson was out presenter.  He has many titles with Stylt.  To keep it short he pretty much is the product manager.  He deals with PR as well.  In all reality, he does everything, but not without a team.  Each project is done in teams.  This way things can get done correctly and allow for different styles to be brought up in discussion.  They have three steps to their processes. First, they create a story.  Once the story is created they start to design the story in the furniture and the branding.  Lastly, they wait for the success.  Every project they have done has been successful.  There is one restaurant that Par talked about with us that they actually made up a story for the design.  Sometimes that is needed if there is not a true story behind the location or owners.

Majority of the projects he showed us were located in Stockholm.  Stylt did have a project in Denmark though too.  They mainly deal with companies in Sweden.  Majority of them being start up companies that need a design.  Almost wish that they did designs in America.  Their work is amazing.  A few of the places that they designed are Le Rouge, Lydmar, The Reef, Fjall Puben, Griffins Steakhouse, Marion's Gastrodiner, Jay Fu, and The AmAsian Steakhouse.  Le Rouge and Fjall Puben are actually owned by the same chef.  I like this because to me that shows that they do a great job with designing.  Why else would someone go back to them to design another place if they did not love what they can do?

Marion's Gastrodiner reminds me of Katie's Diner or Ferchs back in America.  It has this almost 50's feel.  Very Americanized design.  When talking about The AmAsian Steakhouse, it is a combination of Asian and American.  Along with the kung fu pictures there are country side pictures.  On the door of the bathroom is design of a guy in a cowboy outfit with the hat.  Something that would probably freak me out the first time is that once you go in the bathroom and use it the guy starts kicking and moving around.  This is a video that is somehow playing in the door.  I am not sure how it works, but it is an amazing idea.

The founder of Stylt is Erik Nissen Johansen.  He was an artist and decided on a business to express his art in different ways for others.  The name itself was founded around 1986.  Creating Stylt Trampoli was founded around 1992.  A fairly new business, but one that has been doing amazing.  On average is takes around six to nine months for complete an entire project.  The first 200 hours is spent on discovering the story.  The story is the most important part.  The designs are based on the story line.  Due to their previous success with customers they always have some project that they are working on.  They do not have a type of season for their company as most do.  I say seasons as in the down season or up season.  For example, my job back home, our up season seems to be in winter when everyone is trying to get tires for their vehicle when the snow is falling.  The down season seems to be right around summer when customers would rather spend their money on something else. 

Lesiure:

After the ABB presentation we were able to eat lunch at the cafeteria at ABB.  It was really good and
it was nice to sit down and talk with Bertil more personally.  There are so many interesting things that he was able to tell us.  One thing was how they used to have their building downtown.  The people that worked there did not want to move to their current location.  They kept using the excuse that they were in the middle of a project and did not have time for the moving process.  The higher up people only accepted that excuse so many times before they forced them to move.  Some people apparently threatened to to quit if they were forced to move.  No one quit.

A bunch of us decided to go shopping after the company visits.  Because we had such a large group we broke off into smaller groups.  I did some souvenir shopping and some shopping for myself.  It was hilarious when I would see a store I wanted to go into and Sam would just throw his head back regretting being in my group.  Sabrina was in our group too and that was fun.  Sabrina and I really like books so the two of us in a book store was interesting.  Sam was regretting that as well.  He started giving us time limits.  It was not until the yarn store that the time limits were not really enforced.  Sabrina was so happy.  It was like a little kid in a candy store.  I do not know anything about yarn, but I do know about color combinations so I did help her pick out some colors that went really well with each other.  It was a good time shopping with them.  There are only a few more presents that I need to buy for other people before I can really shop for myself.  YAY!!!!

Between business visits we had a little bit of time to look around.  A few of us went into the church across the street.  It was absolutely spectacular.  It was all white marble stone with gold.  It seriously looked as if it was a preview of heaven.  At the same time it kind of made me uncomfortable, because if I am still living I do not want to know what the afterlife is going to look like.  I want to be surprised and I have a long life ahead of me. I do not want to be thinking about that. 

Daily Reflections:
  • Do not wear my heel boots when shopping.
  • The design industry catches my eye.
  • There are definitely some interesting stores in Sweden.
  • I have not seen some of the books here in America.  
  • J.J. really knows some great people.
  • I cannot wait for the next business visit.

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