Final Day - Time to Summarize and Reflect

Yesterday I tried to explain how I felt watching the fantastic soap production work shop with the seaweed ladies like this;

“Imagine as you just have won the world cup in football, you are sitting in the locker room after the final, you have the shiny buckle in your hand, and you feel warm, happy, exhausted and just extremely satisfied at the same time. In that moment, you feel that you have everything you need in live”

Actually, that feeling pretty summarizes how I feel now, the last night of this fantastic week. However, enough with feelings hit and dit. In this blogpost I will (1)try to tell you a little bit about our last working day at the Seaweed Center, (2)then evaluate the oucome of the week compared to the objectives in our project plan and at last (3) present to you the Top 5 List of the ICM School Project Week.

(1) The 5^th of November started extremely early for a large part of the project group. The alarm clock rang already 4:30 and Viktor, Annika, Ida, Sebastian, Marcus Gave and Sebastian headed of to swim with dolphines before breakfast. After our second last breakfast at Zanzibar, half of the project group went to a well deserved time on the beach as the same Viktor and Daniel went to clean the factory, and also to have some quality time with the engineers and the machines a final time. Also, these two lovely students (one in the Business Arena and one in the Judicial Arena) made a plan how the factory will look like when the process is up and running. Of course, this factory plan is according to all the fantastic theories as an industrial engineer can mention in one breath (Lean, TQM, Kaizen etc etc.)

After lunch, the beach group had some quality time with the Seaweed Center stamp in order to finalize the last soaps before they were carefully packed in boxes yo bring to Sweden. Consequently, the quality of the soaps will be as high as possible on the ZanziBar Soap party on the 3^rd of December. At last, the fourth and last workshop with the Seaweed ladies was performed. The theme of today was “English teaching”, and the fantastic teachers Ida and Annika performed almost the whole workshop wearing the Zanzibar traditional “Kanga”.

At the moment, myself is blogging in our mobile office (ak.a. the restaurant at the Blue Lagoon Hotel) while the rest of the group is working on a Seaweed Dance that will be perfomed on the Zanzibar Soap Party.

(2) Now, I will try to evaluate the performance of the project group by linking all our outcomes to the objectives of the ICM'11 school project.

1. Establish a market and create sales channels

   - 20 sales meeting with hotels has been performed. In a clear majority of these, the marketing team has got an extremly positive response, and it is obvious that the Seaweed Center has a hole on the market to fill.

   - A meeting with ZATI has been performed, with a number of praises as outcome along with promises of helping us with marketing in the future.

   2. Development of the Operations
   - Sebastian and Daniel has had hours and hours of quality time with the engineers, and today two of three machines are ready to be used.

   - Four computers with management control systems has been donated to the Seaweed Center and is ready to be used.

   - A lot has been perfomed, both before and during the ICM'11 School Project week regarding packing and design of the soap. Today, the Seaweed Center has a product porfolio of protoypes that has been quality assured by input from the market.
   3. Creation of legal and company structures
   - The structure of the company has been done since months ago, and at the moment, the Seaweed Center are close to be registred as a company in Zanzibar.
   4. Establish the Seaweed center as a knowledge center

   - Today, the Seaweed Center is used every friday as a lecture hall during english classes offered to the local people of the paje village

   - During the project week an “English Workshop” were performed together with the ladies.

(3)As you can see, the project week has been a success. Still, there is a lot of work before the Seaweed Center will be up and running to 100 %, but we are today one step closer than yesterday. The week has been filled with activities and experiences that I will remember for all my live. Therefore, I will try to summarize the week in this fantastic Top 5 List;

5. the Seaweed ladies tour, when we got the opportunity to go with the ladies to their farm.

4. Ana of Zanzibar, a fantastic sales meeting at a fantastic hotel, that served a fantastic mango/passion juice

3. Sean Kingston - Fire Burning, the theme song of the week

2. Jamal, (boy to the left on the picture) one of the sons of the seaweed ladies. He charmed us all and also, at the age of 10, outcompeted Sebastian Palmgren in math skills.

1. The machine workshop with the Seaweed ladies, as I sais just like winning world cup in football.

At last, sorry for making this blog post too long, but it is hard to summarize a such fantastic week in less than 800 words. The plane to Sweden leaves in 17 hours. See you in school on Monday!

Best Regards

Viktor