The 2001 Fellows departed via bus bright and early for day 7 of the International Trip. Our initial destination was the Motorola assembly plant located in Swindon, UK, and approximately 60 kilometers north of London. Our final destination of the day would be Oxford University.

Coincidental Facts: During the excavation work for a housing development nearby the Motorola plant, an ancient Roman residence was discovered. The excavation site contained an ancient statue of the Roman god Mercury, who is the god of commerce, travel and thievery and served as messenger to the other gods. History truly repeated itself in this instance.

 Historical highlights

• Paul Gavin founded Motorola in 1928.
• 1940 Motorola made the first walkie-talkie.
• 1952 first semiconductor
• 1955 first pager
• 1969 Neil Armstrong communicated from the moon to earth using Motorola equipment
• 1980's Iridium satellite
• 1960 first office open in Europe
• 1997 worlds first dual band equipment
• 1998 first handheld global satellite system

 Facilities

• 1100 locations in 45 countries
• 65 manufacturing facilities in 17 countries
• Primary manufacturing at this facility is GSM radio frequency switches for digital cellular
• The Queen dedicated this particular site in Sept 1998. Since its completion, the plant won a variety of architectural and design awards.

• Their philosophy is to partner with their suppliers thereby minimizing the cost of inventory.
• They use long term working agreements instead of formal contracts with their suppliers.
• You have to work with the hub.
• You have to open your books
• You have to reduce your costs on a continuous basis.
• Long-term goal is to have all suppliers on site at Motorola's manufacturing facility.
• Currently outsourcing 6% of their labor and plan to move to 30%. This outsourcing is primarily dedicated to overflow commodity labor.
• Moving towards standardized modular products in order to be more competitive with Nokia, their primary competitor.
• Allows them to insert the customer and their customized features closer to the shipping dock.
• Their philosophy is to have outsource suppliers deal with his part of the supply chain. Motorola sets up the standard and has their suppliers deliver a specific product to them. This allows them to streamline their production and lower costs.
• They elicit vendor input in their whole process.
• This site currently services 92 customers worldwide using GSM protocol technology.
• They are moving to "design anywhere-produce anywhere" production time.

"This is The Goal come to life"…Jeff Smith

"The inspection process is the bottleneck"…Dave Emerson

David noted a truly "multicultural" culinary experience: Americans, in England, eating Italian food that was prepared by an Asian!

 Cultural lannyop (a little something extra)

 Trip from Motorola to Oxford included a stop at a quaint typical English village of Bibury. This village was established in the 1500's. The architecture consisted of locally quarried limestone indigenous to the area. The village included a picturesque trout farm in a bucolic setting.

Dr. David Faulkner, Director School of Management described the Confederation of Colleges that make up Oxford University. Each of the colleges is independently endowed, semi-autonomous and resides in structurally separate locations. It is not a typical US campus setting; it is more like a small town. He gave a brief overview and insightful discussion on the challenges of a truly global market. He feels we are currently experiencing a "Triadized World" including US, Far East and Europe. Africa, Russia, Australia, and the Middle East have only nascent economic voice. He engaged the fellows in a debate using the Socratic method in the best Oxfordian tradition. Then he went on to describe the conception and birth of the 5 year-old MBA program at Oxford. This program, which is in its infancy, is already multi-national in character with students from over 28 foreign countries. Only thirteen percent of the students in this program are British, twenty-five percent North American, and the bulk of the remainder are from Asia. The program is one year in length, consists of four sessions covering 14 individual courses. Tuition and fees are approximately 20,000 pounds ($34,000 US) This years class has 80 students of which 22 % are female. Over the next few years, the class size will increase to approximately 287 students. Entrance requirements are stringent with average GMAT scores of 664 and a GPA of 3.5. The college recently received an endowment of $20 million from a Mr. Said for whom the school is now named.

 They are hoping to develop future leaders not just business consultants. As with most business schools Oxford University is currently struggling to acquire and retain faculty since compensation for teaching is limited.

 After a delightful but brief tour of the town of Oxford we once again started our sojourn to London which seemed interminable due to traffic gridlock.

Dinner

The class had their group dinner at Chez Gerard in the Covent Garden area (French food in England?) A wonderful time was had by all and this was a nice way to conclude a diverse day, American Company in England, Oxford University and French Food. This was truly a global experience. (pictures to follow….)

Submitted by Team 4 - Millennium Falcons.