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A company

Multi-year project for an investor.

For professional discretion reasons, the following summary is greatly limited.

A German SME approached me, requesting I establish their corporate presence in the People's Republic of China. This meant establishing a supply chain company with a to-scale implementation of their entire workflow in a different market, mindset and sociopolitical environment. 

A rough overview of steps involved:

-Immigration to China

-Business Plan

-Legal prerequisites and registration process

-Physical Company premises 

-HR

-IT

-Workflow

-Vendor relations

-Customer relations

-Future stretegy setting

 As an added bit of difficulty, this undertaking had to be done during the Covid-19 pandemic. The resulting challenges were immense and would require an extraordinary amount of adaptability and understanding. Rather than dreading these, I decided to see the chances hiding behind the challenges and showcase the viability of my solution through trial by fire. The results were amazing.

I. Preparation


Preparation and planning is always needed for successful application.

The first task would be to understand the parent company's inner workings, mindset, history, situation and future plans as well as their position on the market and in the supply chain. Each entity - corporate or personal - has its own identity. This identity, this image, not only may but inevitably is perceived by others in a nonidentical way. Visualizing both the internal and external company images from multiple viewpoints would be a permanent and continuous process, the first key to which was understanding the tangible workflow itself. 

That said, fulfilling the task given meant learning not only the specific workflow of each individual department and their interdepartmental handshakes. It meant specifically understanding the underlying logic and deeper connections in more obscure instances. This involved questions outside the usual envelope while creating a semiuniversal workflow to carry over. Since no form of handbook either existed or was supplied, I'd have to create one from scratch. Eventually, this would not only benefit the new branch but also the parent company.

In parallel to studying each department, a good amount of time was spent strategizing and preparing the in-China endeavor. Several prerequisites I was provided with: Company location (city),  overall establishment timeframe and third parties for immigration and legal support. The scope of service of these third parties was "to be figured out by myself once there". In addition, the new company-to-be was assured an initial scope of business and customers as well as intensive on-site support by existing staff.      

It is here that the pandemic provided its first challenge. The decision having been made to rely on third-party support as well as to not react to the rapidly evolving situation meant that the border to China would be shut days before my scheduled departure to start implementing.



II. Entering a locked country





Mobirise



What was I looking for?
Well, being a startup in the trading sector meant that a lot of the company's activities focused on storage and logistics. Thus, I allocated a lot of space to that.

My strategy was to set up all core processes and train key staff first of all.
It was only logical then that I'd keep everything closely together.
The initial layout, as seen here, combines a proto-warehouse with an all-round accessible unpacking and packing area as well as office space on as tiny a footprint as possible.

Every key employee is in direct contact with the core duties of the business and gains an intimate understanding of his and others' duties. This greatly accelerates training as everybody gets to live and understand the business proceedings and product flow much more closely than otherwise possible.

Not only does this create a fully functioning and highly efficient business, it also permits all this in an incredibly short amount of time and lays the groundwork for easy scalability. 

Mobirise



Naturally, environment protection and energy conservation are important.
But the amount of natural light I was getting in the warehouse area was not brilliant, owing to the particularly robust building construction that I need otherwise.
Powering all the lights there all the time was wasteful. But how about a motion-sensor actuated array per aisle?
That would be very environment-friendly, yet also immensely practical for the workers. Problem was that each sensor was also brightness-sensitive.
So, if the adjacent aisle was illuminated, the sensor would not trigger. Unacceptable. A ready-made solution was unavailable and the locals' proficiency in such a special case was nonexistent.

Mobirise



So I just made my own solution, as usual.
A few minutes in CAD, some 3D-printing and various paint layers later, the sensor shades were finished - and working perfectly.
That took far less effort and expense than trying to find a specialist on the market.

Mobirise



Since I wanted to display some products, a showcase shouldn't be amiss.
The ready-made ones looked kind of cheap but weren't.
So I designed my own using very simple means.

The aluminium profiles used are something I'd grown rather fond of lately due to their universal nature and great flexibility.
It allows for free adjustment of individual shelf-layers, too.

A bent sheet of perspex was simply wedged in and slots perfectly into the aluminium extrusions' grooves.

Well it's a shelf.

Mobirise

As mentioned before, scalability was extremely important.

One of the main reasons I decided on that particular property is the  4.5 meter high ceiling.
I'd intended to, as soon as the business grew, increase the effective areas both for storage as well as staff on very short notice.

In February 2022, this foresight became very important.
Due to an urgent need to double our available space by mid-March, this plan was put into action.
I had planned to build a second story to the warehouse with a cargo lift in order to make perfect use of the space available at first.

Originally, I'd envisioned 8 weeks for the project. Unfortunately, I's only had 5.

Also, COVID forced us into intermittend lockdowns in March. Workers couldn't come, deliveries were delayed and we had to do a whole lot of dancing around new regulations that hindered the process.

Of course, would we not have been able to keep the tough timetable, I'd already prepared alternatives. Five times of temporary storage would have been available.

Thanks to the combined effort of everyone involved - and the occasional night shift I had to pull - we got everything done in 4 weeks, much to the delight of our business partners.

This was part of my 3-stage plan for 2022 that would bring a lot of exciting news which I'll disclose as they happen. It also depends heavily on the extremely regrettable lockdown situation. 

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