MBA EXCURSION TIME
News
The MBA students´ third semester started off with 3-day field trip which took them to company visits and meetings with company executives in Oberderdingen, Frankfurt and Klingenberg. In compliance with the 3G regulations, Prof. Markus-Oliver Schwaab, responsible for company contacts within the MBA program, was able to put together an exciting program for the students.
Since the MBA learning experience does not only take place in the classroom, the program provides its students with the opportunity to gain insights into manufacturing and business processes of multinational corporations and hidden champions. Plant tours, presentations and direct contact with managers and HR personnel help our students to get an idea of German industry.
BLANC & FISCHER Corporate Services
The first day of the excursion took the MBA students to BLANC & FISCHER Family Holding in Oberderdingen, where they were welcomed to the Future Kitchen Lab by senior executives from BLANC & FISCHER Corporate Services. One of them, Aleksandar Jovicic (Employer Branding Specialist), had put together an exciting agenda that gave the students a good overview on the different business areas of the Family Holding. In addition to exciting insights into the company and its history given by Robin Dehm (Head of Corporate HR Projects & Essentials), Daniel Czemmel (Director / Head of Business Development) talked to the students about business development from a strategic perspective and introduced the launch of great new products such as ATOLL. The visit also comprised an extensive overview on the product portfolio of E.G.O. and BLANCO which were presented by Tilo Fucik (Head of Product Management application cooking at E.G.O.) and Felipe Webermann T. de Azevedo (Head of Market & Product Communications at BLANCO).
Innoplexus
In the afternoon the MBA students visited Innoplexus in Eschborn near Frankfurt. The start-up, that was co-founded by MBA´s alumnus Gunjan Bhardwaj, is a leading global AI-based platform for drug development which tracks down and prepares professional knowledge from the Internet and various databases. The goal of the platform is to enable the pharmaceutical industry and medical professionals to be able to develop new drugs and therapies much quicker than before and provide them for lower prizes. Executives from different fields such as Vatsal Agarwal (VP AI & Computational Linguistics), Dr. Werner Seitz (Senior VP Translational Science) and Patrick Wild (Chief Operating Officer) gave the students great insights into the practical application of cutting-edge AI technologies that are used by Innoplexus. They also presented the new app CURIA to the students which was launched only a year ago. The free app, which bundles all available knowledge and the latest research findings on individual cancers, is intended to give cancer patients new hope by enabling them, e.g., to get a second opinion from a specialist or to get in touch with others affected by the disease. Ram Shoham (VP Corporate Development & Partnership) had prepared a case study for the students and gave them important impulses for their further career. At the end of the visit CEO and co-founder Gunjan Bhardwaj shared some personal experiences with the MBA students and talked to them very inspiringly about his mission and vision.
On the second day of the excursion the MBA welcomed interesting guests to the seminar room at the hotel.
Thomas Heck, PwC
Thomas Heck who is a Partner at PwC and heading the PwC European Chinese Business Group first gave an overview of his different international career steps which lead him to New York and Shanghai before he returned to Germany in 2016. Given his profound expertise, he had an interesting discussion with our students regarding his experiences when advising Chinese companies that want to invest in Europe. The industries in which the Chinese invest their money depends largely on the political leadership in Beijing, which has determined the fields in which the country wants to make progress by 2025. To close the loop Thomas Heck also advices European companies that have the ambition to expand their presence in China. Thomas Heck, who himself is an alumnus of Pforzheim University, did motivate our MBA students to get involved in international and intercultural projects to develop their professional profile in the best possible way.
Govinda Ahuja, BASF
In the afternoon the MBA students were happy to welcome an alumnus from their very own MBA program. Govinda Ahuja who was graduated in 2014 is currently working as a Manager in Business Development at the BASF Group. Govinda started off with a presentation on BASF and a report on his current area of responsibility. Govinda gave several examples from his current and past experiences from the multifaceted profession of strategy and business development, wherein he could bucket his responsibilities into five diverse aspects. First of all, Govinda has to build trust in the customers, consumers and other key stakeholders. At the same time, he has to be a fortune teller when predicting what kind of needs the future will bring, and last but not least, he has to find the right story behind the numbers and figures. Besides all these challenging tasks, Govinda also has to track and chase business objectives and has to serve as a navigator in turbulent times. In the end of the session Govinda shared his own day to day experiences with the current MBA students and showcased that it is possible to achieve a lot if you are open-minded, passionate and willing to adapt to the cultural environment.
After a day that was packed with very interesting business talks the students went for a guided city tour through Frankfurt. Besides the historical background and stories from Frankfurt´s early and recent past, they also visited Germany's newest “old town”. The evening was rounded off in a traditional wine tavern (Weinstub) where the current MBA students met with a group of MBA alumni for an exciting evening of networking.
Alexander del Toro Barba
The third excursion day started with Alexander del Toro Barba, Lead Machine Learning Specialist at Google who is also a guest lecturer in the MBA at Pforzheim University this semester. His topic of the morning was Quantum Computing & Quantum Machine Learning. During his presentation, Alexander Del Toro Barba explained not only about machine learning, which is a statistical model based on training data from an artificial system that runs generalised learning phases, but also about qubits, the basic units that exponentially increase the amount of information you can process and the current state of development. He also gave an exciting outlook on quantum computing, explained the key things to know and to do for companies to be well prepared for the future and elaborated on the engineering challenges to build effective error correction, which would mean to build a processor with many more qubits than has been demonstrated until now. The session was accompanied by lively discussions, as some of the MBA students had already dealt with this specific area of IT in their earlier professional lives.
WIKA
The MBA students ended their excursion with a company visit to WIKA in Klingenberg/Main, a worldwide leader in pressure and temperature measurement. The group was welcomed by Sophie Staudter (HR Assistant) and Linda Grimm (Junior Recruiter) who guided the students through the afternoon. After a joint lunch Martina Mischitz (Executive Vice President Human Resources) gave the students all important information about WIKA in her company presentation: from the beginnings and this year's 75th company anniversary to the subsidiaries in 44 countries, the high-tech solutions used and the huge product range. Thomas Hartnack (Corporate IT | Director Corporate Processes) elaborated in his presentation on International ERP Strategy about the rollout of D365 Baseline at WIKA, followed by Petra Kramer (Director WIKA Mobile Control) and Dustin Gerschner (Marketing Manager WIKA Mobile Control) who gave the students an idea of their business unit, which is all about safety and integrations namely cranes, MWEPs and telehandlers. The close partnership and relations between WIKA Mobile Control and various universities was also addressed by them. Pratik Vishwakarma (Product Manager), an Indian native and graduate of the dual study program at WIKA shared his personal experience with the MBA students about starting off in the German labour market after finishing his studies. After a coffee break Florian Zahn (Project Manager) guided the MBA students through the newly constructed and very impressive innovation center which, in addition to spacious offices for different departments offers modern meeting areas and much room for R&D labs. The exciting visit to WIKA was concluded with a presentation by Stefan Lux (Vice President IIoT Products & Solutions), who introduced us to WIKA's IIoT value chain transformation and journey.
