 Thank you for joining today's event. Please stand by for about one minute as we let people join the room and get situated. We hope you enjoy today's presentation. And our staying safe. So welcome to the first MicroMasters Open Access Live event of 2021. So this is a cross course collaboration event. We have students from SC0X, SC2X, and SC4X, so which are the courses of our MicroMasters program currently running right now. And of course, this event is also open to all other supply chain enthusiasts anywhere in the world. So I'm Sindhu. I'm currently running SC0X course, and I have Laura with me, SC2X course teacher, who will be co-hosting this event today. Thank you, Sindhu. And hi, everyone. Welcome. And thank you for joining us today. So today we've invited Leebin Huang to chat with us on optimizing supply chain to meet stakeholders' needs. So just a little intro about Leebin. So she has an undergraduate degree in medicine and holds a master's degree in strategy management and product development in bio industry. So she recently graduated from MIT's supply chain management blended master's program, which makes Laura, Leebin, and me its classmate. So Leebin has worked across multiple industries, first as an entrepreneur and later as a supply chain professional. So currently she is serving as the director of operation strategy at Abort Diagnostics. Thank you, Leebin, for taking the time out to join us for this live event. Great. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to see you both again. I have to say the MIT supply chain blended master's program is truly an amazing experience. And I am grateful to meeting all the line-minded supply chain professionals like both of you around the world. And thank you for the opportunity to share my personal experience here with all the Michael master learners. Thank you. Thank you. That's great, Leebin. We are so happy to have you here with us today. So for all that are joining today, today's topic is often raised by our learners in discussion forums in our courses. We get questions like, how do we apply certain models or techniques that are taught in courses? How much of the outcome from models and algorithm are we supposed to implement? Or maybe how do we consider external factors that cannot be modeled into account? So while we may not be able to touch on all of these topics, we felt that drawing on Levin's insight here would help address the topic of putting theories into action. During the conversation, we will answer a few questions we received in advance from learners. For those that are joining live or not currently enrolling the course, please let us know your questions in the Q&A tab. Also, if you are taking a course, you can jump in with your question in the Q&A tab, but please rename yourself, write in your name and the course name you are participating in so we know who you are. Probably something like this. Yeah. So Levin, before we jump to the topic of our discussion, help us set some context about your experience. So how does a person who has studied medicine end up on the path of supply chain management? What caught your interest in this field? Great, sure. So I have to say that I learned from my career that supply chain is a backbone of any business. No matter what industry or job functions that you're in, you will interact with supply chain at some point. So as Sindhu introduced earlier, after I graduated from medical school in China, I continued my study in the business management master's program. And subsequently, I started my own business as an independent consultant, helping Western companies to do business in China. This experience really opened my eyes on the complexity and opportunity of global trade. So later on, I joined a leading product realization in contract manufacturing company with over a hundred manufacturing sites around the world. In that company, I had various different roles from business management, strategic planning, to mergers and acquisitions. Supply chain management is the core competency of a contract manufacturing company. I learned so much from this career experience and deeply appreciated that how an agile, transparent and scalable supply chain can be an important competitive advantage to help create value for our customers. So currently, I'm a director operation strategy for healthcare product company, where my responsibilities are developing and implementing strategies to drive network optimization, to enable reliable supply of health products that our customers depend upon. I started my Michael Masters journey in 2017 working alongside supply chain professionals. I wanted to really get more knowledge in supply chain fundamentals. So I can better make connections with them and help them to develop the initiatives. So I was working full-time and I needed something really flexible and online. So I came across the Michael Masters program. I took SCX-0 first and with the intention to try it out, I was so impressed with the quality and I decided to complete all the five courses and pursue the Michael Masters certificate. So like Sindhu mentioned, we went through the Masters degree program together in 2020. So yeah, this is my background. That's great, that's impressive living and thank you for sharing that. The journey of yours actually answers also some questions that are brought from our learners, like how am I supposed to be in supply chain or it's still in supply chain if I'm a finance manager or a food engineer or an IT professional. I have to say myself that I started in finance and cost-controlling, so I totally see that point. But as you said, and as we always share together, supply chains are applicable in every industry, touch every aspect of doing business. And it's just about being curious enough to figure out the problem statement and acquire the skills to solve it just as you explained you did. So now getting on the topic of the day, let's go to stakeholders. Stakeholders have many, many interests that needs to be addressed while designing as any supply chain, like for example, minimizing costs, providing a better service level and so on. What were some of the big concepts that you applied in your work that helped in optimizing supply chains? Would you tell us any big takeaways that you want to share? Sure. I would say I learned a lot from each of the MicroMasters courses. And I have used many of the concepts in my work, especially the concepts from XCX0 Supply Chain Analytics and XCX1 Supply Chain Fundamentals. So those two courses for me out of foundations help me better understand the mathematical basics for optimization, simulation and trade-off considerations for supply chain policies. Early in my career, when I was in business development role, we help our customer to reduce their overall supply chain costs by optimizing the total ended costs, which means the overall cost from building material sourcing to the delivery of final products, including the manufacturing, transportation, customs, and transit inventory handling and carrying costs. One of the tools behind this approach is the Mixed Indulger Linear Programming that we will all learn about in XCX0. So this is just one example of the Mixed Indulger Linear Programming Application. It's a very useful tool that you can use to help improve all areas of supply chain from day-to-day operations, such as resource planning, production planning to network design. The XCX2 courses provided deeper understanding on supply chain network design and that builds up on the mathematical basics from XCX0. So in my current role, one of the key responsibility is to optimize our network. I have used models from simple Excel model like the ones that you will all learn from the course or to a more complex model using software or Python programming. However, for me, the key for any network optimization project is not building the model, it's understanding the problem itself. So typically I have a few steps I always take for network optimization projects. So the first step, I would try to understand what is the real problem we're trying to solve. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. My recommendation is don't always assume. For example, sometimes you may initially think it's an inventory problem, but after deep dive, you realize it's an order pattern problem. So to understand what problem we're trying to solve, I would first map the current processes step by step, talk with process owners, gather data along the way, supporting each of the steps, understand how things are working and why they're working this way. So after understanding the real problems to solve, you can still building the models for different scenarios and point stakeholders to discuss trade-offs. In this step, it's important to identify the key drivers for the decision and how the variability of those drivers can impact the outcome. Not only the quantitative drivers like cash flow, cost saving, lead time saving, but also the qualitative factors that are important to your business. It's important to understand how the new design will support the business objectives. For example, as a consumer electronic company, time to market probably one of your top consideration, but for healthcare product company, compliance and quality are top priorities. Lastly, I would like to borrow Chris Kaplis' mantra that you will hear many times throughout the XCX course. Models don't make decisions, people do. Back to you. Nice. Thank you, Levin. That really explains... I mean, we really like the way you explain that. It's not important to, you know, right away collect data and build the models and start finding solutions, but rather understand the problem statements, you know, understand what are the constraints that are going into ideating different scenarios and then use, you know, the underlying techniques and then build the models and run them. So that's great. Thank you so much for sharing that. So related to our discussion right now, there are a lot of questions from learners which we received around COVID-19, of course. So when such unexpected scenarios arise where our supply chain networks are stressed, right? So what would your recommendation be for a turnaround? So when such... How do we deal with such external factors that we probably wouldn't have taken into account when we are, you know, making our models and creating our structures? Sure. Yeah, COVID, it's such an impactful event that touch everybody's life and every company's, you know, operations. From my opinion, I would say the pandemic further accentuate the importance of robust close-loop risk management and business continuity planning because no model can accurately predict when and what risk will take place. Any business should have a plan to respond to unwanted disruptions. Have a deep understanding of all aspects of your supply chain, identifying the risks and vulnerabilities and how they may impact your business and develop risk mitigations plan around these variables. The risk factors are also dynamic. So we need to have a processor monitor and update trigger points. This include updating the set models and structures for mitigations with lessons learned from the unexpected scenarios like today, the pandemic. So the risk management plan also does not exist in the vacuum. We need to evaluate and communicate with the supply chain internal and external stakeholders frequently. So when the unexpected happens, all parties are on the same page and move towards the same direction. That's great, Livia, and thanks for sharing. And I think this is also another tool that could be helpful and I would love to address here. So building upon the network design concept and this communication you talk about, according to your experience in the general field of supply chain from all your years of experience, what is the importance being placed on end to end disability? Yeah, it's a very interesting topic. So I think supply chain visibility has become more and more important to companies as the supply chain become more and more complex. For example, if a manufacturer needs to recall products, it's important to have a visibility on where the product inventory is across the distribution channels and the customers whom they sew this product to so they can inform the parties impacted and retrieve the products in a very timely basis. And also another example, if an unexpected shortage of the component, which is only less than 0.1% of the product costs that can shut down the whole manufacturing line due to lack of a supply chain visibility. So the shortage could be caused by many reasons, supply equality issue, loss or delay freight, regulatory issue, but without a visibility we cannot mitigate it. Connecting to the pandemic question that we just discussed, if a company have end to end visibility of their supply chain, it will be able to see the normal supply or demand behaviors from the suppliers and customers in the early stage of the pandemic and able to develop proactive mitigation plans to prevent unwanted disruptions of the operations. So in my view, end to end visibility is the foundation that enables a company to be proactive and efficient. Enabling the visibility often involves connecting data that are in different format, different refreshing cadence and from different silo systems to generate actionable insights. I believe as supply chain professionals, we all desire to have this end to end visibility of our supply chain. However, many times this could mean significant investments, in which case it's important to lay out and align the future vision with the organization's leadership and prioritize the initiative based on the benefits versus efforts taking incremental wins to demonstrate a value of achieving the final goal. That's very true living. And I would like to move on to the digital transformation line. Now that you talked about this, trade-offs between the technologies that we might need and that we would love to have and the cost that we can afford and the technology that is available wherever we're working. So we have a related question from Manish. So he's saying that the modern tools such as machine learning and artificial intelligence and has two questions. Why if they are, we think we're placing human managers somehow and also if supply chain manager have to learn the new tools to keep up with the modern times? I would say yes. I believe data analytics and data science skills are more important now than ever. Like you mentioned, right? Digital transformation, industry 4.0, those are hot topics nowadays that you can see everywhere from industry literatures or discussions in an industry summit. So many companies are going through different stages of these transformations. More and more data will come from supply chain. As supply chain professionals, we need to have the skills to understand and leverage the information. I think it's very important to understand the basics and theories behind the different data analytic tools, but I don't believe that we have to be the expert in programming, I'm not. So if your company already implemented ML or AI, the data science knowledge will help you better understand the model and ask the right questions to evaluate and improve the ML models. And if your company is still developing the data strategy, the data science knowledge will help you bring on the right tools, right skill sets for your team. Interestingly, about the question of AI replacing supply chain professionals in the Capstone project of the SEM program, my partner and I studied human machine teaming in AI driven supply chains. Among the successful AI implementation projects that we studied, one common theme is that AI are not replacing supply chain professionals, but are becoming more of a human's teammate to augment human's capability in better decision-making. That's very well said, Leven, yes. And I don't think we would agree that you are not a programmer because we've seen your skills in our classes during our master's program. But thanks for the comment saying that human managers are not necessarily, they will not be replaced by the program, but then there's something that would go hand in hand to be better. So thank you for the discussion so far. I think we've quickly progressed through the live event and it's nice how our discussion so far has touched almost all of the SCX courses that are currently running right now. So just a quick thing for the professionals who are not enrolled in any of our courses. So we have about five courses as a part of our MicroMasters program, which ends with a comprehensive final exam. So upon completion of this, you'll receive an official certificate in MicroMasters in STM. So if you need more details, you can always visit our program page. And also there is this other live event we did where Dr. Ponsay, our executive director, spoke about the details of the program and also the value that it brings. So we will send you these details in the follow-up email as well as it will also be available in our platform as well for you to check it out. Thank you, Cindy. So now we'll get some questions from the crowd and the questions we received in advance. Remember to rename yourself, mentioning your course number if you're enrolled into one. I would like to start with this question from Steph Living and this is totally for you. How has the MicroMaster course enriched the traditional master education you received? I would say the MicroMaster course is very supply chain specific and gives a lot of great information on supply chain fundamentals. So the traditional, so I did have a business management master's before taking the MicroMasters program. So the business management master's program gave me a great perspective for all the different tools that I need from a business management standpoint, strategy development, product design, and quality management and all the general concepts that I need to get into. However, it's not deep enough for the supply chain fundamental concepts. So the MicroMasters program really give a great introduction and great education on the fundamentals that you will need to use or leverage in supply chain. So I think this is totally related to that. So I will just jump in with the second one we got. Our learners are asking, especially Sandeep, how did your viewpoint toward SCM problems change before and after getting this specific technical skills you got through our course? Was there any change in the point of view and how you jumped in in maybe your board meetings? How this did change your SCM view? So I would say helps me better understand why things happen this way and how things are operated. For example, understanding how inventory policies are setting and what kind of different approach that we use in inventory policy setting and also have a broader perspective understanding how one decision from one value chain step of the supply chain could impact the entire supply chain or entire value chain through the bullwhip effect so that you will also learn how in the SCX course. So yes, I think the MicroMasters course give me better understanding on the details of the supply chain and broaden my perspective. And when I speak to supply chain professionals and when I work with them, that helped me to speak the same language if you will with them. And yeah, so that helps to better drive the final outcome set we desired. Great living. And now I will give you some seconds to rest and I will jump into Sandeep. I also know Sandeep has been taking the MicroMaster in the past before going to the blended master program. And she did it when she was working and had her own a hobbyist going on. A lot of people is wondering how do you handle the courses, your day-to-day life, a full-time job and the application to a residential or blended master program. How was your journey? I think this is one of the famous questions that we always get. How do you manage it, right? So for me, when I was working, so I was a full-time professional when I took up the MicroMasters program. So working during the weekday was not an option. Monday to Friday, it was just morning to evening, the same drill, go to the office, work in combat. So the time that I used to work or study the MicroMasters courses was only during the weekends. So I would start on Saturday mornings and at least try to be done by Sunday afternoon so that I have at least a Sunday evening free for me. Some of the courses were tough. I mean, probably after SC2X and so on, it gets a little more tricky. You need to spend some more time. So that time it would spill into Monday, but then you have to manage somehow, right? Because the courses are so interesting. They start with being completely mass-based where probably if you get the concepts, you can quickly solve the questions, but then later it becomes more into concepts and understanding, getting more into the qualitative part of the supply chain. So it takes a bit more time. You wanna get into depth and understand what you're studying and everything. So, and also probably one of the other strategies I applied was to take courses one at a time because it was definitely not feasible to take two or more at once. Some of the learners do write to us saying they are taking two or more courses. That's the food of to them because I definitely was not able to manage and I was like doing one at a time. And probably the drafting was also better if I did one at a time because the courses were demanding as well. But then it was worth it. And yeah, that's how I was able to manage. Thank you, Sindhu. I got another question that I think it's interesting. I will jump in with some brief comments myself but I will then go to living with it. So we have one of our members in the audience asking, after 20 years of experiencing supply chain, will this give me something new? I will say I had over 10 years, not 20 when I started with the Microsoft program but I have to say that it gave me a lot of technical skills and we also discussed this with living in the past. We did many things but we didn't have the frameworks or we probably didn't know what was behind the underlying data and the technology we were using, how things were done. We knew we had some tools but probably didn't have this formal framework. And I think that's what the micromaster gave me and that gives you also a lot of strength to go to your meetings, to stand in front of the people you have to convince about any supply chain decision because you have a well more structured presentation for your data. I don't know what we're leaving if you want to add something else. No, I absolutely agree. I think I agree to everything you just said. It's always great to, even though some of the concepts that you may already know, it's always going back to have a very structured way to understanding each of the concept and how they connect to each other. And I also have to say one of the new concept that I really appreciate, that I learned from the Michael Masters program is simulation using and also system dynamic and understanding how each of the components are impacting each other and how we can leverage different simulation tool to understand the different elements and different variability of the factors can impact each other. So yes, I would say it's very interesting. Thank you, Living. We have a question from an undergrad student that is joining us and he has taken our course and wants to know how to get into the industry, which kind of tools do you think it's super important to have, maybe not only based in the techniques, special in supply chain technical skills, but maybe in their capabilities, what else do they need to develop to jump into the industry? I would say just like, I think a general rule for learning development is 70, 20 and 10, right? So 70% learning through doing. So if possible, I would recommend to look for internships or summer job opportunity within the industry that you're interested in and start from there, get better understanding of the industry and from operations to various functions through that value chain and learn as much as you can. So I would say, yeah, so that would be one of the recommendation and then I have 20% learning through others. So taught with people who are in the industry and then learn from them and understand what make them successful and then what are the trajectory those people went through. So I would say those are the next steps that I would recommend, look for internship or, and then talk with the industry practitioners. That's a great piece of advice. Thank you, Living. And there is something else that people is jumping in with many questions in the Q&A. But I think it's a great part of our program. We have some people saying I am very, I'm very experienced in the IT field or very experienced in finance as we talked before. And there is also a question about networking. How does networking make supply chain professionals better? And how does that help to improve in your career? So I think that this is one of the greatest thing of our course. We have these people from all around the world that are all interested in supply chain. Some of them have more experience in one or another field or a different industry. Some people just begin and we have undergraduates and we also have master program people, PhDs doing this. How would you consider networking important for supply chain in your own experience? I think networking is very important, not only for supply chain, I think for any job functions. Relationship is one of the foundation that helped you broaden your trajectory. And one of the thing that I feel I'm lucky in my career that is that I have met a few great mentors. So that's really helped me and guide me through my career trajectory. So finding a great mentor or finding several mentors in your career, I think is one of the important step and really connect with them and learn from them and get coaching for the development. And also networking within the company that you're in, maybe different divisions or different business units, even different job functions. So it doesn't mean that supply chain have to network with supply chain person only. I would highly recommend learn as much as you can from other functions, commercial, how they sell and why they make business proposals and why they make business proposal this way. And I think all those would help you when you develop your supply chain strategy, implement strategy initiatives in supply chain, you'll have a full understanding of why we're doing what we do. That's great living, thank you. I think we have so many questions we probably won't be able to address them all. So I think we will stop it by now. This brings us to the end of the live event. We hope the conversation offer you some insights and optimization supply chain to meet stakeholder need that was our main goal. So thank you, Libby, for taking your time out of your busy schedule to join us. We truly appreciate it. Thank you for answering so many questions and for giving a great piece of advice for all our learners. We can tell you, Simu and I share the same perspective of networking, about communication. So stay tuned. You will learn a lot of great information from our course and even language to speak with other people, even if you're not in the same field as us. So thank you, Libby. Thank you. Yes, thank you everyone for joining today. We'll follow up on an email and see you in our courses as well. We'll be also sharing the links to the recording of this event or you can find it in the YouTube channel. So thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye everyone.