I'm back!

After an April 1st that lasted for 30 hours due to all the time zones I was passing through and not having slept horizontally in a bed since the night of March 31st, I have returned safely home to Cambridge after working on our Lion Team project and then touring companies in Shanghai and Tokyo with the LGO International Plant Trek.

All in all, the trip had four parts, a LGO only benchmarking excursion to Beijing at the beginning of the trip (we wanted to see if another company had similar problems to those that Sandisk wanted us to address), then time in Shanghai with just our Lion Team - the 6 LGOs and 6 CLGOs, time in Shanghai with everyone on International Plant Trek (IPT) and then time with everyone from IPT in Tokyo, Japan.  It was a whirlwind 16 days.

Highlights of the trip included getting to spend a week working closely with six CLGOs on our lion team project for Sandisk.  They were fantastic hosts and translators and very encouraging as they watched me drop many things in my attempts to master chopsticks.  I appreciated getting to have extra one on one time with them because I feel that we were able to get to know each other much better compared to if I had just come for international plant trek.  50 with 50 is much more challenging than 6 with 6.

The Sandisk Lion Team at a classroom in Shanghai Jiao Tong University

We had many types of Chinese food with them.  Just as the US has regional specialties, we tried Hong Kong style food, Shanghai style, Cantonese style, etc. - some were spicier, some were sweeter, but I would say that I found all of them better than American style Chinese food.  I even tried frog and eel which I had never had before.

Our Hot Pot dinner at Little Fat Sheep (English Translation) - two types of broth were boiling in this bowl on our table and we cooked meat and vegetables in them

Between Lion Teams and International Plant Trek I visited six companies - Sandisk, another consumer electronics company for benchmarking (I'm not writing it here since we're not giving the name to Sandisk), Nike, Cisco, Sony and Nissan.  We got to see everything from production to distribution to product showcases.  It was pretty impressive.  I'm glad I chose to both do Lion Teams and International Plant Trek, but have been happy to be back in the US also.  I can't believe it's been a week already since I returned.  More to come!