Global Supply Chain Lessons
LFM '06 conducts internship in Texas, China
March 31, 2006
For MIT Sloan MBA or LFM students, the internship between the first and second years provides an excellent opportunity to accumulate a new working and learning experience. Typically, the internship is spent in one company, one location. However, for Johnson Wu, LFM ‘06, his 6-month internship for both Foxconn and Dell took him from Boston to two distinctly different locations: Austin, TX, and Shenzhen, China.
While on his internship in China, Johnson Wu had the opportunity to visit Elephant Trunk Hill.
Although Wu is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker born and raised in Taiwan until he moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1991, he had never worked in a Chinese-speaking company. “The unique opportunity to work with Dell and Foxconn allowed me to apply the business skills I’d developed in Sloan, supply chain knowledge I’d acquired from LFM, and my bi-lingual abilities,” says Wu.
“Dell is the largest global PC maker, and Foxconn is one of the largest contract manufacturers in the world. From these two manufacturing giants, I was able to gain some valuable lessons in global supply chain management and cross-organizational challenges,” adds Wu. He spent the first month of his internship in Dell’s factory in Austin, TX, July and August in Foxconn’s facility in Shenzhen, China, and the remainder of his internship back in Austin.
Foxconn has several manufacturing facilities in China and produces either partially-assembled or fully-assembled electronic products for many renowned American consumer electronic makers such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and Motorola. “The objective of the internship was to help both Dell and Foxconn build a more flexible supply chain in light of the chipset shortage,” Wu says, adding “A chipset is a critical component in a computer. Without it, the computer cannot function. However, the industry-wide chipset shortage was having a negative impact on Foxconn’s capability to provide a high service level for Dell, and thus increasing the manufacturing and logistics costs for both companies.”
When asked what his biggest challenge was during the internship, Wu responds, “Getting all the stakeholders aligned within one company was already challenging enough. It was even trickier to work with stakeholders from two companies!”
One of the strategies Wu deployed early in his internship was to get his supervisors from both companies to be on the same weekly conference call. “I believe constant communication is a key way to minimize disruptions and discrepancies between two organizations. The weekly conference call helped my supervisors develop an eye-to-eye view of the problem we were working on, and it enabled me to gain alignment and trust from them.”
In addition, Wu held regular one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders to provide project updates and gain their feedback. The geographic distance and 12-hour time difference definitely created a challenge. “During the two months I was working in China, although it was not always easy to find a common time to talk on the phone with the stakeholders from Austin, I was proactive in scheduling these meetings to prevent the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem from happening.” Through these efforts, Johnson helped the project team reduce the manufacturing and logistics costs by 50 percent.
This internship also provided a great way for Johnson to observe the cultural nuances between two different companies located in two different countries. “While Dell and Foxconn are both very cost-conscious and customer-focused, Dell has a more bottom-up leadership approach, while the leadership style at Foxconn is more top-down.”
In terms of the supply chain lessons he learned, Wu reflects, “In successfully managing a global supply chain, one needs to examine the supply chain with a holistic perspective. This Dell-Foxconn internship did exactly that for me. If I had only spent my six-month internship in one company or one city, I would only be able to understand half of the complex global supply chain.”
Indeed, the global learnings and cultural observations are what made the internship unique. Wu summarizes, “I will be able to take these valuable lessons with me regardless of where in the world I will be working after I graduate from LFM.”