Tuesday, May 17

            On Tuesday we made our final company visit to PPG, which was a little more significant than the others because it’s a Pittsburgh-based company and one of the senior people from the supply chain department who we met in one of our pre-departure meetings actually flew all the way to Germany to meet with us again on the company visit. It was another long bus ride though, and thankfully our last, but just like every other one pretty much all of us slept the entire way. The plant was in a small town like Lear’s plant, and from the outside it looked old and boring. But once we got in and had a look around the facilities it turned out to be really cool and interesting. The presentation was really good because it gave an overview of not only how they make the paint but also the challenges the company faces on the business side and the way it deals with all of their complex supply chains. Following the presentation we were given a tour of the manufacturing facilities, and I was so impressed by how many different colors they were able to make, 1500 different colors to be exact. They also told us that they have to predict when and where a color will be popular, and plan almost 5 years ahead when making some of the colors, which is quite impressive. I was relieved to finally be done with all the company visits because while they were interesting, they began to get very repetitive and long. When we got back to Augsburg I just hung around with a couple of kids from my group and then went to bed, as everyone else was finalizing their presentations.