China - Shanghai - 3/14/2005

Today I started the day a bit slower than usual due to my having taken a Nyquill pill last night. To make matters even more fun as soon as we got down for breakfast we got a note saying that our departure had been moved up by 15 minutes, meaning that everybody got down to our departure point late, thus starting our morning the way the rest of our day would go (getting late everywhere).
Our first appointment during the morning was a visit to Shanghai GM's plant. The plant is a Joint Venture between GM and Shanghai Auto Industry Corp (SAIC), and the plant looked like almost any other in the world as far as the processes and the layout. We got a very interesting presentation on the history of the business in China, then we got to visit their showroom to see their vehicles and took some interesting pictures. After the showroom we got a plant tour where we followed the manufacturing of several of their cars from simple parts all the way through being fully assembled. The plant was less automated than the ones in the US, but in the Q&A session we found out that this manual labor provides a higher quality level in the cars than in more automated plants.
After our plant visit we went to lunch in smaller groups so we could avoid going to a Lazy Susan restaurant. It was much better fare than usual, especially since we got to pick the dishes we wanted.
Once we were done with lunch we headed to meet our Jiaotong counterparts. While our counterparts had been very dilligent working with us from the US, yesterday only two of them showed up out of the 5 that made up our team, thus not allowing us too much of an opportunity to get that much work. Before getting to work we had our Jiaotong counterparts come with us shopping for suits at a tailor, but since I couldn't figure out what the difference was between the fabrics, and they weren't able to negotiate a very good deal we simply walked away. After that we went to a Starbucks so we could shoot around some ideas and get to talk further about our project. We came up with some interesting ideas, and a working schedule to produce the expected results including company interviews and competitive analysis.
After we came up with a good plan we decided to start going out to work on it, but as I got to the place we were going to I was just too sick and tired, so I left the team and headed back to the hotel to get an early night's sleep.
After a nyquill I went to sleep around 9:30 pm.