Day 9: Managing some complex environments

     Today consisted of two company visits, Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park, or VSIP for
short, and II-VI. Before the trip, I did my preliminary presentation for VSIP, so I have been
looking forward to this visit. It has a very similar business model to Phu Me Hung, except
that it focuses more on industry rather than residential areas. We heard a short
presentation from Tran Thi Quynh Thanh, their marketing person. I thought it was pretty informational but we unfortunately did not get much time for questions.
     Directly after VSIP's presentation, David Baker from II-VI gave us a briefing on his company. David is the chief engineer of II-VI and is an ex-pat from Florida who has been working in Vietnam for the past couple years. Interestingly, II-VI is actually based in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. They expanded to Asia for lower labor costs, as they also have offices in China and Singapore. The company gets its name from two columns on the periodic which have metals commonly used by the company. They specialize in optical and thermal technologies, and they have their higher tech production plants in the United States. The presentation was very interesting, the company makes some pretty cool stuff. We got the chance to see the production floors of two buildings, one for glass lenses and the other for thermal chips. I thought that it was pretty cool to see the actual production in progress. My favorite part was seeing large vats used to plate chips in tin, because I actually learned how metal plating worked in chemistry this past semester. By using electrolysis, you can coat a metal in whatever solution that it is currently soaking in. I got to see what I learned in the classroom in person, so that was pretty awesome.
     We went to lunch after the company visits at this very cool restaurant. It had some pretty fancy feng shui and a nice tropical vibe. Unfortunately I was not able to get any pictures of it since my phone died. If you want to check out some pictures of it, I suggest that you find pictures from blogs by other people on the trip. Sorry for the lack of pictures on this post, bye everybody.