I recently made a quick trip to Shanghai, China, the financial center of China. I landed on Friday evening and went for a brief tour of the old part referred to as the Bund Architecture which the British built a hundred years ago. If you look across the river you will see the new skyscrapers which, from a distance, could be any major city in the world.
There are approximately 20,000,000 people living in Shanghai and that is a little larger gathering than I personally enjoy. But, they consider a small city to have approximately 5 million, so I guess when the country’s population is well over a billion, they’ve got to live somewhere.
I was staying in a nice hotel that, except for having no slot machines or casino, you might think you were in Las Vegas. At breakfast the next morning, the buffet reminded me of Las Vegas as well.
Later on Lewis, one of Bovie’s Quality Engineers, and I met with Frank, the President of the company we were visiting, and a Very Important Supplier to Bovie. Lewis goes over for weeks at a time to help make sure their quality system ties into ours. I was very impressed with not only the level of automation, but also with their passion and willingness to improve. My purpose for being in China was to see the manufacturing facility and the progress that had been made there.
It was a quick but memorable trip. It turns out that Frank had been reading my blogs and mentioned it to Lewis. Lewis said he didn’t realize that I wrote a blog. OK, let’s think about this. I fly halfway around the world, in fact the time difference is exactly twelve hours, and someone there is following what I am writing here. Social media really is pretty amazing. Almost as amazing as the products Bovie makes.
J. Robert Saron
President
