DENSO Manufacturing Michigan (DMMI)—Danaflex, a modern packaging factory in Kazan, Russia, is highly automated and very clean— “quite comparable” to DMMI, according to its chief financial officer.

But the similarities pretty much end there, said CFO Vasilya Shalabodova.

“Production workers make about $400 per month,” she said through an interpreter. “But that’s pretty good, considering that the cost of living is much lower in Kazan and Russia.”

Shalabodova was among 11 Russian finance directors who visited DMMI on the first leg of a three-week trip to learn about business practices in the U.S. Their stay in Battle Creek was sponsored by the Cereal City Sunrise Rotary Club.

Danaflex, a three-year-old plant with about 150 employees, makes packaging for things like candy, detergents and individual servings of ice cream.

To get to their eight-hour shift most line workers ride the bus each day through Kazan, an industrial city of about 1 million located about 500 miles east of Moscow. Most of these workers are men. And management personnel at Danaflex are like Shalabodova—they’re mostly women.

Shalabodova was impressed with DENSO’s strong quality control system and bar coding of parts.

“We’re definitely not there yet,” she said.

—Lois Matthews

Vasilya Shalabodova, CFO of a Russian factory, was at DMMI in September as part of a weeklong visit to Battle Creek to study financial systems and procedures at U.S. manufacturing companies and to gain insight into free-market capitalism. Photo by Matt Burton