 Hello and welcome to the MicroMasters program in supply-chair management brought to you by the Center for Transportation and Logistics. My name is Alex Rotkopf and I'm the course lead for SC0X. In the MicroMasters program we invite you to learn from the decades of experience of the researchers here at MIT. SC0X is the first of five courses in this program and it provides you with the basic tools and methods that you need in the following courses. I just recently joined the Center coming all the way from Germany. I have over 10 years of experience working with companies and non-for-profit organizations on solving their supply chain problems. I especially like SC0X because we teach here the tools and methods that I use every day. For example, I'm developing new methods and metrics to evaluate the capacity of emergency response organizations and we use stochastic linear programming to do so. Stochastic linear programming is one of the first lessons that we take in SC0X. In another project we build an optimization model to better understand the value of new generic suppliers for procurers of essential medicines. Because we wanted to capture competition as well as supply risks, this problem is very complex and we are using simulation models to solve it. Simulation is one of the topics that we will cover in SC0X as well. We are here as a resource for you to have the best learning experience. So use the forum, use the email to ask questions and let us know how we can help. We are very excited to have you joining us from all over the world. Thank you for choosing the MicroMasters program. We wish you a great learning experience with the course and good luck. Welcome to SC0X supply chain analytics, the very first course of the MicroMasters program. I'm Athika Rizwan and I will be your TA for this program. I'm a second year master student at MIT pursuing a degree in system design and management. One of my key areas of interest is operations management and I'm doing a big data analytics project as part of my thesis research in operations management. I come from India and I like painting, playing tennis, traveling, reading and music. This is the second time I'm TAing this course and I couldn't be more excited to get this journey started. The great diversity and experience the learners bring to this course is a great learning experience that I'm looking forward to. I have two quick tips for you as we get started with this journey. Tip number one, week zero is pretty important. It has a lot of information that you'll ever need to know to navigate through the course and to know how the course works and how the forums are used etc. So make sure you go through week zero pretty well. Tip number two, make sure you attempt the quick questions and the practice problems before you give the graded assignments a try. That is going to be way helpful as you move forward with the course. So let's begin the journey and have a lot of fun. Thank you and welcome again.