Vienna’s Study Tour Part 2 – BMW, Mondi Group, Ottakringer

As promise, here is the second part of our Vienna study tour 🙂 I’ll cover the afternoon part of the second day and the third. Let’s get started! And thanks to Nina Choakpichitchai, Chawin Thanasakkosol, Chang Song, and Benny Tjahjono for all lovely photos.

After having lunch at Voestalpine Plant in Linz, we moved on to the BMW plant in Steyr – another exciting place to visit. BMW’s Steyr plant is in charge of manufacturing the heart of BMW’s vehicles – its engines. All of BMW’s cars with diesel engines sold across Europe are manufactured within this plant. Working three shifts a day, around one million parts are processed and produced within the plant. We received a good opportunity to visit and explore their production processes from end to end, as well as the history of BMW’s engine development. It was fascinating to see how the company invested so much in R&D. It has developed its bulky engines to the smaller-size descendants but with higher horsepower and quality. It was very knowledgeable.

After visiting the BMW plant, we returned to Vienna. That night we had a group meal together. The food was nice. We enjoyed the chit-chatting and the excitement after the tour.

Then it was the individual return. Some decided to head off to enjoy the night view in Vienna. Some went for a few more drinks. But for me and my friends, we were quite exhausted from the trip. So we decided to go back to the hotel so that we could be fresh and ready for the next day!

On the third day we had quite a late start. We left our accommodation at 9.00 for Mondi Group (which was good because I got to sleep a little longer!). Mondi Group is a paper-packaging manufacturer. Their products range from white A4 and A3 papers, dog-food plastic printed packages, corrugated boxes for wine glasses, and more. We visited its headquarters in Vienna. The office was right in the middle of the city. The view was extraordinary and the presentation session was extremely fun. It was very interactive. Some of Mondi’s actual past business scenarios were thrown at us to analyse, criticise and explore. We laid down our ideas to discuss with Mondi’s representative, Mr. Michael Stadler – Mondi’s Consumer Packaging Business Unit Supply Chain Manager. He helped correct us and shared actual practices Mondi implemented for those case studies. We had so much fun and learnt so much more about packaging after the session.

After our lunch, we left for Brauerei Ottakringer’s beer factory. It is the last large brewery factory remaining in Vienna. It is located in Ottakring, the 16^th district of Vienna. So the brand’s name was taken after the district name where it originated from. It was also a two-hour visit, starting with Ottakring’s history, brewery processes (sourcing, fermentation, quality control and bottling), supply chain presentation, and beer tasting.

Apart from the visits to the different companies, we still had some free time after the tours and a whole free day on the fourth day before heading back to Cranfield. We took loads of photos, here are some of them!

The tour was brilliant. We had so much fun and learnt so much. We got to see the practices we learnt in classes play out in actual operations. The experience was priceless, especially the time we got to spend with our friends before going our separate ways to complete our theses. However, all of these wouldn’t happen without the support from our course director, Denyse Julien; all arrangements from Melanie Ellis, our Student and Academic Support (SAS) staff; Nicky Yates and Benny Tjahjono, the faculties who took care of us during the tour; and other current and previous faculties who helped set up the tour. I am very grateful and had so much fun. Thank you so much!

So that concludes our Vienna study tour. I know it’s a long one, but hope you all enjoying our blogs 🙂 See you next time.