The main aspect of Eurotech’s travel portion is the site visits we do in order to learn about how prominent and successful companies use data and other IT related skills to make business decisions. On this year’s trip we visited EY, Halma, IBM, Open Classroom, BMW, Heineken, Nestle, Cern, and lastly CONSOB. My personal favorites were EY, Heineken, and IBM as they were the moist interactive site visits and I felt that the company presenters really took the time to help us learn about what they do and how big company’s use IT related skills in the daily business life.
EY London, was our first stop of the trip and personally I thought took the top sport for best site where we truly learned about big data in the business field. During this visit we covered topics including RPA, Cloud, Ai, Block Chain, and Big Data. It was very interesting to see how all of these different IT related areas are used in global markets. EY, I thought, did the best job at relating their company and work to us students as they even had a former iSchool student, Bappy, now EY employee tell us about his experience transitioning from SU to EY.
My next favorite visit was to Heineken, here we learned about the emerging technology, Global international Service (GIS), and product innovation. We were guided through Heinekens work life Shridhar Mahesh, Head of Global Information Services, who gave his speech about the combination of marketing and IT within Heineken. Personally, I really enjoyed seeing how Marketing and IT skills were combined in many of the topics our presenter spoke about. Their new Smart Fridge basically does it all from having Wi-Fi connectivity to inventory counting and rotating images on the door. While the Ai Extreme Blue is a distribution planner that optimizes logistics, transportation, etc. And lastly Heinekens use of 3D printed spare parts allows for the company to localize their products and much more energy and cost efficient.
Lastly, IBM took the top spot for the most hands on visit as the majority of our visit was a design thinking workshop, which I thought was a great way to spend our time since it allowed us to feel as though we were doing something similar to the workers at IBM. Kelsey Hudspeth, the client experience leader at IBM, did a great job of teaching us about life at IBM through a very hands on and participation heavy speech and later with the design workshop. We learned about how IBM is highly innovative and technologically advanced. For example, I thought it was very interesting to hear that they used CO2 sensors to calculate how many people are in a certain room at once in order to optimize space and not waste energy.
EuroTech 2019 