Day 5 - Heraeus a Fantastic Family owned business and more :-)

Hallo and welcome back to another edition of my blog,

Today was a long day and tomorrow will be longer :-) We traveled a short distance to Heracus World Headquarters. They are one of the largest employers in Hessen, with over 11,000 employees and 10 billion Euros in sales. We started out with an overall presentation of how their apprenticeship program works. They do many different types of internship/apprenticeship programs. For high school kids they offer a 2 week course to help them find a trade or technical field that they would like to work in at the company. They get over 1000 applications, 250 are interviewed and accept around 100. Can you image the positive effect this has on students who were not doing their best? WOW, they what a motivator something like this would be to our high school students. We watched a funny I-spy type movie about the company history, products, divisions and types of customers it supports.

Mary got to say "HI" to some of the students that came to Gateway in prior years! :-)

We then went on one of the most informative tours in a production plant. They took us to their light bulb manufacturing line where they make specialty lighting for copy machines all the way to tanning beds. The process is all done by hand as the lot sizes are small and the customer has a quick turnaround time requirement. They stress quality and it showed in each step of the operation. Then we went to see how they quality check these bulbs and the burn-in rooms.

After this we had a wonderful lunch in the company cafeteria. There were about 7 major choices for lunch and it was excellent. I had pork sausage, sauerkraut and fruit. YUMMY! I could not take any pictures while at the Heraeus plant as it is highly secretive. You can see information at http://heraeus.com/wch2/dach/e_wch_home.nsf/$frameset/startneu


After lunch we met the VP of marketing for a division that had flawless English and he took us to the trading area. Heraeus trades precious metals for its manufacturing plants and customers. The area was impressive with each trader having a specialty metal and 4 monitors with data and live trading feeds from all major exchanges.

We returned for a wrap-up presentation and thank you from Zina Haywood and Gert Friedrich. Then we drove to the city of Hanau for some touring, we went into a jewelry museum called the Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus. See the pictures of stuff that was NOT for sale. I would have thought about buying some honey, honest! LOL

Our meeting place in Hanau was in front of the statue of The Brother Grimm, do you remember them from your childhood? I did not and I had to ask Gert. He asked if I remembered Hansel and Gretel? In front of the statue was Mary's dream car....There were a lot of older cars getting ready for a real road rally in the morning. Hey where was Mary when we left anyhow?... ;-)

We shopped for about an hour before we took another tour. One of the local brewery's took us for a behind the scenes tour of the entire process and they were brewing. It was incredible the amount of different pieces of equipment needed to brew and the processes it goes through to become beer.

Wow, what a day, tomorrow is filled with a LOT and will be our longest, however, as you can see by the pictures we were all still having fun!

I hope you enjoyed our journey! See you tomorrow! :-) Guten Nacht