 Welcome back supply chainers. So now we are going to discuss about your feedback about your the first round the fresh connection or any other question that you have related to the micro master or verification or anything. We are just happy to answer any questions you you might have. So as a starter question I think a good question for you would be when do the next runs of the fresh connection start and what if I didn't play the first round. Yes. So currently a round two of the first connection is open now and the deadline is this Wednesday, October 18 at 1500. All of our deadlines are at 1500. So now yes, you can play round two is open now and you will have almost one week. Next Wednesday, we will close their round two. If you miss round one, if you miss round one, nothing happened. You can start now with round two. The only thing is you are going to start in exactly the same point as if you were in round one. So you are going to start with the minus 3.96% of our eye. Then you can start playing the game. So really encourage you to go through with zero videos, review the material and play the game and go go and do it. As one of our students put it's like the Super Bowl of supply chain games. So I think that's a that's a really good quote that I'd like to share here. Yeah. Okay. So then for round three, we'll be opening week five. We will open week five from October 25. And again, all of the rounds this time are going to be open for one week. So we will close on November 1st. And round four, we will close on November 15. So I'm one more thing, round two and round one, the level of difficulty is exactly the same. That means that the number of decisions that you can make are exactly the same decisions, number and type of decisions. However, round three and round four, the level of difficulty is a little bit higher, a little bit more complex, because you are, you have more freedom. You have more opportunities to take more decisions. So in this sense, yeah, it's going to be a little bit more complex, but since you already play at least one round, you are going to be ready to take achieve or accomplish this level of difficulty. So, yeah. So this in terms of the logistics, let's go through the questions. Absolutely. So, okay, so we received from Ahmed, Ahmed, he said, how to leverage decisions regarding labor and transportation costs to optimize performance. This is a great question. This is one of the trade off that we already covered in a C1X and is this decision about, yes, labor, how many resources we need to have, transportation, and I will also related this with the service level, which service level I want to offer to my to my customers. So all of this, this is one of the key things of the first connection. So in every single decision you are going to make in the game, there is a trade off associated with that is to take with more resources and offer a better service level. I have more involved in stock and then the cost of the associated to the warehouse is going to be higher. Should I reduce the number of people in my warehouse? Should I increase that? So everything is about this trade off, mainly between resources and cost, mainly between cost and service level. So all of the game is about that. Are you going to give here the solution or what you should do? Absolutely. I don't know if you want to add anything here. So there's, it really kind of comes back to what your overall strategy is. So if your overall strategy is to provide to have low, low cost incoming goods, you might have transportation that's not nearly as good. So the first player that we saw, they're actually their inbound transportation, give them a poor service level coming in, which led led them to have to have a higher outbound warehouse so they could manage that low incoming service also they're saving money there. At the same time, you have to get the balance that somewhere else. So there's other costs that didn't get incurred somewhere else. So on the other side, if you pay for really high or really good service levels on your inbound transportation, you might be able to lower that cost somewhere else. So increasing the cost here might lower the cost there. So it's exactly comes back to what you said, it just has to do with the strategy that you want to create. Based on the strategy that we identified in this first round and also in last round of SC4X, we identified something that some of the students really focus on efficiencies that means really focus on reduced costs, inbound costs, outbound costs, cost of transportation. Some of the students just focus their strategy is service level and provide the best service level they can. So again, define your strategy, see what you prefer to focus on and based on that, make your decisions in each of the roles in the game. So I think this is my recommendation for this. What else? Okay, so this I made also said, if my strategy is to increase customer satisfaction with no or minimum penalties at a grid level of 95%, what should be the trend for different areas to realize and align them. So here you want to focus on customer satisfaction that at the end you should focus on service level. All of the decisions you make need to be aligned to increase the service level in the different areas of the company, service level with your suppliers, service level with your customers, service level in all of the single parts. So I would say that in each role you need to have in mind this strategy and make decisions in consequence. Absolutely. So like giving a game time example, something along the lines of I want to maintain the strategy level becomes what do I need to give up to maintain the strategy level. Sometimes you give up shelf life, which means you get less revenue, but you maintain your strategy level. And sometimes you have a larger outbound warehouse and you store more products, which means you might have more obsolete products. Sometimes it could be another any other number of factors that lead to that. But in the end, it just depends on what you want to give up. Sometimes it's a balance of all of those things. And a lot of the times this entire game is it's around finding a balanced strategy that can that can manage all of these things at the same time. This is a great point. We identified last year that some of the students just focus on balance, balance in between cost and service level and not a super high level, not a minimum cost, but this balance. Absolutely. So again, this depends on the strategy you want to follow. And another thing is that there are some decisions that you can make you are allowed to do in the game. There are some decisions that you are not allowed to do so. Also, you need to play with those with this grade of freedom that you have in order to make decisions. So yeah, and what else. I have a question on how to interpret the index on material costs. Okay, so for release and really recommend you to go to the to the videos, I think was in segment three that I cover all of this, all of this part I went through the report and went through the relevant and indicators or relevant radius that was there. Every single index so really, really encourage you to go through these videos in order to understand every single report I just covered every single concept. I really encourage you to go there and have a look to that and a quick, a quick answer to this, just to provide a real quick answer. So if you look in your materials cost I think it's in one of the information it's not the information center I think it's one of the information tabs. They have a cost like the base cost for all of these supplies and products that you have in that the base cost is multiplied by that index number to give you your total cost. So you pay 6% above the average if it's 1.06 on your index cost. Yeah, and I think you cover that in your videos. There is also a great resource on the platform on the game that you can go every single time that you have a question like this. There is the resource on the platform that you can go there and there is a detailed explanation about what is this specific index, what does this material cost include and the definition. So always encourage you also to use this resource on the platform that I found myself very, very useful when I was playing the game. Yeah, what else? Yes, you are allowed to join to round 2 or round 3 or round 4. There is no prerequisite. You can't play round 4 without playing any round before. I really encourage you to recommend you to play the 4 rounds because this gives you more opportunities to play with the game to understand how it works. But there are no prerequisites. If you are just joining us for round 4, you are going to start from the starting point. This is the only thing. So in any case, with the same password username that you can retrieve in Week 0 where there is the section, the press connection, how to access the press connection. You can get this password and it's the password for the 4 rounds. Just one username and password for the 4 rounds and you can play any of these rounds. It's not mandatory to play the 4 rounds. What else? Okay, what's a framework should be set up as spreadsheet for calculation about different decisions? That's a tough question. So it depends on what your strategy is. So this comes back again to the overall overarching decision. Now at the same time, this entire game is completely mathematically based. All the calculations and estimations can actually be made based on the strategies that you have. So we've taught most of these different concepts in our courses. It's just a matter of bringing them together and applying them. So if you go through the case study, there's a really good example on how to do the statistical analysis on how much warehouse size, how large a warehouse to make. So that's a good example of how to tie this together. Now how you choose to develop your spreadsheet is completely up to you. The more interactive you can make it, the better. And it doesn't have to be a spreadsheet. It can be pencil and paper calculations as well. I saw learners that use in each step, they want that per roll. And each of these steps, they did different calculations. They were calculating the you could work. Absolutely. I'm trying to apply the techniques that they have learned in order to make their own decisions. But it's completely free. Find the best thing that work for you. Pencil and paper, a spreadsheet, whatever works for you. Yeah, for each role, I think you can use different techniques here. So what else do we have here? So Amit, Amit is asking, would it be of any benefit to use a SEM package to make through the first connection as a real situation in real world? I don't know what you mean with SEM package. If I'm understanding this correctly, I think the question is asking, should we try to use an SEM package to manage this company? No. And the answer is definitely no. So the idea is about you forming a strategy and then understanding the base level. If you do go to the global challenges about building the teamwork and then working together as a team. So this is about just getting a general understanding and strategy. It's not about modeling. No, no, no. My recommendation here is just to go through each role, to make your decisions. I really recommend you to play more than one round, because until you end the round and you receive your own results, you are not going to know how well your strategy works or not. That's why I encourage you to play, to take risks here and then you need to wait until we close the next round and see the impact of your decision. So I think it's more about apply your own decisions here and see the impact on the performance of the company, not more than that. All right. We have another question. And then it's where to find the case study that I mentioned. So that's a great question. So in week zero and SC4X, there's a whole whole section dedicated to the fresh connection in the section of Eva's video. She does a really great job explaining the game. This is probably your top resource to get started on top of that. We have a fresh connection and some questions that will help you to understand it. The questions even have solutions. They're just like practice problems. So to help you to really understand the fresh connection, give an idea for the math behind the game and how far you should really take your calculations. And then you will also find the case study that Connor prepared last year. Also, it's going to help you to understand the game much better. So I really encourage you to go through this material. Yeah, so perfect. So I think we're good to go. Absolutely. Okay, so thank you for joining us today. I hope you are enjoying SC4X. I hope you enjoy the second round of the fresh connection and go go and just do it. Play with the game, enjoy, learn and try to compile all of the all of the tools that you already learned with us and try to apply to these fantastic games. And don't forget to have fun. I mean, like that's the most important part here. So always have fun. Yes. Okay, bye.