On October 29th, our students from the Global Manufacturing Master Program and Tsinghua-Aachen Joint Master of Science Program visited the Beijing-Hyundai Motor. 

The industry tour started with a welcome opening from the tour leader from Beijing-Hyundai Motor, where the background of the company was briefly introduced. Beijing-Hyundai Motor presented an appealing video of their company profile as a starter to give the students a broad picture of the company. After the video session, the tour guide started to introduce more about the company, and gave a detailed explanation of Beijing-Hyundai Motor’s strategy on covering the Chinese vehicle market with a range of products carefully designed for Chinese customers. In the following Q&A session, students shew interests in knowing more about the business side of Beijing-Hyundai Motor and therefore posed questions about topics such as the sales and growth of the company, suppliers, the distribution of the shares between Beijing and Hyundai, and other questions that cover the curiosity of how Chinese global business strategy works in Beijing-Hyundai Motor. 

During the tour of the production floor, the students were able to see how the production line of Beijing-Hyundai Motor was especially designed for a flexible production type. There were a large variety of products in the same line. The tour guide explained in great details why and how the floor was designed in the way it is, and what advantages were with this kind of design. The students could clearly see how a vehicle was assembled from parts and components. The students posed questions regarding the perspective of the production system. The tour guide explained the production rate, bottlenecks, and the Kanban system that they used. 

After floor tour, the students visited the testing line for the completed vehicles and were told about the defect rate and actions taken to the vehicles that fail to pass the testing section. 

Office of International Students Affairs, IE Department

Nov. 2015