We started off today very early with a wakeup call at 4:45 am and a four-hour bus ride to Pune, a city southeast of Mumbai. Perfect time for nice, long nap!

Our first business visit in Pune was at Tata Motors, India’s largest auto company. We were greeted very warmly by the Vice President who showed us an introductory video about the company. I was amazed to see some of their projects in the film, and even more in awe when we got to tour the factories. We saw a variety of assembly lines; there was everything from putting the doors on to manually screwing in small parts under the hood of the vehicles. While I am not by any means a car expert, I really appreciated the amount of planning, time, and effort that went into the actual assembly of the vehicles and making sure the business runs smoothly. What stood out to me as a unique quality of Tata Motors was its commitment to the satisfaction of the customers and employees. This always comes first, followed by revenue. Tata Motors is not all about making as much money as possible; it focuses first on the people involved.

After a grand tour of the Tata Motors plant, we drove to GlobalStep, a video game testing company. Here, we went up to the fifth floor and saw what looked like hundreds of cubicles in a large room, all with curious eye peeking over the walls. These were the video game testers. I wondered why all the computer monitors were turned off and no one was working, then realized that what they do is top-secret stuff! There was no way we would be allowed to see the unreleased material they were testing. I learned that visits to the office are a rare occurrence, which explained everyone’s eyes on our group. Our host then took us to a nearby hotel to give us a short presentation about GlobalStep. After, we got to interact with many of the people who test the video games. Similar to Tata Motors, I was not in my area of expertise, but I learned a lot about the process of finding glitches in video games. 

In both the companies we visited today, I was very happy to see how much the employees love their jobs. Tata Motors offered wonderful accommodations to the workers, and the GlobalStep testers got to be around their favorite thing all day! Even though we woke up very early, everyone was in high spirits. It was a good last day of company visits, and I am really looking forward to experiencing the Indian marketplace tomorrow morning!

Bye for now,

Jennifer Lina Cox