It is exactly two weeks since the Normandy Fall Programme has started by Ecole De Management De Normandie. Our stay has been organized in the campus hostel itself in Caen which is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of Basse-Normandie region. The city has about 113,249 inhabitants while its urban area has 420000, making Caen the largest city in Lower Normandy. Caen is known for its historical buildings built during the reign of William the Conqueror (who was buried here) and also for the battle for Caen – heavy fighting during the Battle of Normandy in 1944, destroying much of then city.
Our tour is a perfect blend of study, industrial visits and happy weekends. I mentioned weekends to be “happy weekends” because it’s the time when we actually get to explore Europe.
From Monday to Friday , our pragramme is scheduled with the classes in which 4 days we have class room learning and 1 day we have industrial visits. It’s really a good experience to study here in France as we get to interact with people belonging to diverse cultures. Here, class room leaning includes knowledge with exact facts, historical backup, practical views ,showing of videos related to the ongoing topic , interactive sessions , presentation of views at the end of every sessions in groups and much more in each session
The modules which we are studying are also perfectly blended and supported by the related industrial visits which transforms the classroom learning to practical learning and hence helps in visualizing the intangible knowledge. Following are the modules which we are studying:
Supply Chain Management
In this module, how the functioning of a company/firm/industry happens in terms of appropriate inventory, logistics ,resources ,workforce and successful supply of product happens. To support this module , we had a visit to Le Havre Port which is one of the biggest port in France which defines a perfect management of receiving & dispatching shipping goods .
Doing Business in France
This module helped us to understand the market conditions of France. We studied that what all it took companies to be in France and what all are they doing. As part of the assessment we were told to do an imaginary merger of a French company with any Indian company which could be profitable to both.
Digital Marketing
By only producing goods, is not a guarantee to a successful business. If we are talking about doing business, profit making is the main objective and in order to make profit a product needs to be sold and for that its important that it should be properly marketed. Now a days, being digitally active and promoting digitally is the need of time and through this module we are trying to get the same.
Business Project
This was the best part of the programme as we were divided in groups with people we don’t know and this project helped us to interact with other people as well. In this project we were given one company and for that we had to report regarding all the marketing strategies adopted by that company and what all did it take for that company to operate and establish itself.
We also experienced 2 industrial visits as of now in which we went to Abeey factory and SS Utensils factory which was experience at the best. We were lucky enough to witness each and every fascinating process and got to see how the factory manufactures its products and what are the steps involved, right from the processing of raw materials till supplying the actual finished products to the end users or the customers.
Finally, when it comes to weekends, exploring Europe is what no one wants to miss. Visiting the city of love “Paris”, Belgium, Amsterdam & Switzerland was such a nice cross culture experience as this was the time when we had the opportunity to visit these places and also we met different people, got to know their lifestyles , their cultural values which is drastically different from India.
