 Hello, global supply trainers. My name is Ahmad Mehmeti, and this is the first Hangout in SC0x. Today with me is Dr. Chris Kapliz, he's executive director for MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. And he's going to talk about and give an overview on the SCX courses in particular SC0x. So before we start, maybe I should give some statistics for the course. By now, we have more than 25,000 enrolled students. The median age is 29 years old, and we have 22% female. We should increase. Yeah. From 175 countries. And for the first time, India is the first. Wow. With 20% US with 19% and Brazil with 4%. Wow. It's usually those three, but it's always been the US first. I think there's might be a person before 90 raised to 20%. This might be the first course we've had where US was not the number one. Yeah. Yeah. It's the first. That's crazy. So, Chris. Yeah, so what I want to do is just talk a little bit about the way the courses are, because this is the first one probably that you've taken. And then also the whole suite of the courses. But I want to take this opportunity for you guys, if you have any questions. Now's the time to chat, to send those into us. And then when I'm done giving this overview, we'll try to answer those. So if you have any questions, now's the time to use the chat. And then Amat and I will answer them. I'll let Amat answer the hard ones. So you are two weeks in to a five course program. And so each course lasts a total of 12 weeks. So you're two weeks into 60 weeks. So you're just getting started. And I know typically when people are just starting on this, they say, hey, I thought this was a supply chain course. Why all the maths here? And we do that for a purpose, for a reason. Each of the courses has been designed very deliberately to build off each other. That's why we highly encourage you guys to take them in sequence. Because if you start taking SE3X before you take SE0, you're going to have to catch up on a lot of things. And you might miss some things. So what we try to do in zero is we try to give you the tools. This is an analytics course. And so it gives you the basic building blocks and tools that you'll use throughout the rest of this course and honestly throughout the rest of your career. Now in the very first lecture, I made the point that we're trying to teach you to be drivers of cars, not mechanics. But you have to be a good driver. And you need to know how the engine works a little bit. So that's a fine line that we ride. Because a lot of the times, for example, in the optimization that we're teaching you, you won't graphically solve an optimization problem in practice. However, it's very important for you to know how that works so you don't violate an assumption. So you need to know how it works to some degree, but we're not going to go down to proofs or any of that kind of stuff. So SE0X, we've divided into two big parts. Optimization or the deterministic side where everything is known, right? For your optimization problems, there's no randomness, there's no stochasticity. The second half of the course, we allow randomness and we look at it through a couple of different approaches. We will talk about statistics and we'll talk about regression and we'll use simulation. So the basic building block tools that you'll use throughout this course and throughout the rest of your career, optimization is probably the biggest one you're going to use. And then probably simulation, regression and some statistics depending on where you go. But across the course, you'll use each of these. And so these are the tools. So think of SE0X as building your toolbox. In SE1X, we talk about the trade-offs in supply chain and these are the fundamental supply chain trade-offs. It's going to be cost versus service, transportation versus inventory, a risk of overage, risk of underage. And so you'll use all those tools you learned at SE1X and apply them to real situations. Now we'll go through the different models with small problems because once you understand the concepts, we'll start with forecasting where you'll use all the statistical analysis tools, the regression tools that you learned in SE0X. Then we'll go into inventory, which is all about optimization. So you'll use some of the unconstrained optimization that you learned in the first or second lesson, all the different functions that you learned. You'll use those a lot in inventory because you're trying to minimize the total cost. And in transportation, again, you'll use a lot of optimization because you're optimizing the choice of modal choice. Which mode do I use? Do I do railroad or truck? Do I send an ocean or air? It's all about optimizing a cost function. So all the things you're learning in the abstract in SE0X will apply in SE1X. Then we move from 1X to 2X. And 2X is all about the design. So supply chains, like I said in the very first lecture, is a system. It's a series of intertwined entities. One company is supplying to another company in different continents, at different time zones, different product forms. So it's very complicated. And so we have to figure out a way to design this. We design it along the three flows that we introduced in the first lesson. The physical flow, the financial flow, and the information flow. So for the physical flow, it's all about network design. Where do I set up my facilities? How do I flow my product? And this will use what you'll learn and be introduced tomorrow, lesson week three, mixed integer linear programs, which is another form of optimization that is widely used. Every company has this embedded in the systems that they use. So we'll determine how to physically design your network, where to locate your facilities and flow your products. Then we'll use the same optimization for planning, production planning, aggregate planning, demand planning, all of those type of things use the same type of optimization. Then we'll move and we'll kind of switch the course kind of pivots, and we move into other things along the information flow. We started looking at how you communicate with your suppliers and with your customers. We'll go through procurement and how to develop a procurement plan and how to source products. And we'll finish up with supply chain finance. That's a financial flow. And we'll have other people come in and talk about how you make a quantitative, monetary assessment of the different investments. So SC0X, 1X, and 2X, up to the halfway, it's all about mathematical models, developing them and applying them from SCX to the midterm on, then we start getting more qualitative. So we talk about supply chain finance, we talk about procurement. And then in SC3X, we make the switch to talk about some of the complicating factors, things that make it a little more difficult than the simple models you learned in SC1X. Things such as the system dynamics where you have interaction between complexity in the system. So we'll talk about the bullwhip effect. We'll talk about interactions between companies. We'll talk about global supply chains, which introduces a lot of complexity into a supply chain. And we'll talk about disruptions and how they ripple and have a ripple effect through the systems. So SC3X is where we really change and you start talking about the complications in supply chain. That's why we call it supply chain dynamics. In the final course, the fifth course, SC4X, talks about solving all the problems we've done previously in the real world. So in SC1X and 0X, we solve small problems, we'll use spreadsheets and little tools, and that's great to learn the concepts. However, in practice, you shouldn't be using Excel to run your production planning. You're gonna use a different type of system. So what we do is we introduce the whole idea of big data. When you have large, massive sets of data, which you will have in any kind of real supply chain, what you need to do is structure that data. Spreadsheets are great, but they're very unstructured. And you know, if a mod makes a spreadsheet, it'll be different from if I make it, it's very flexible, that's its strength and its weakness. For large systems, you need structured data. So we'll introduce you to relational databases. You'll learn structured query language and get really good at working with relational databases, because that's how these problems are organized in real practice. Then we'll move in and do a little bit of machine learning, which is another kind of analytical technique that's being more widespread, but it's important that you have some context before we start doing it, and it works best on large data sets. And we'll finish up by talking about real systems. So we'll talk about ERPs, Enterprise Resource Planning, CMSs, Transportation Management System, Warehouse Management Systems, Manufacturing Execution Systems, and other systems that are done in the supply chain space. We'll talk about what they do, who makes them, how you select them, and issues with implementing them, because the history of companies is littered with bad implementations of these systems. And so you have to make sure you understand what it is that you're getting into. So that kind of introduces the real world implications. So zero gives you tools. One teaches you how to make trade-offs in the supply chain. Two makes you do design decisions for the physical, financial, and information flow. Three introduces complications, and four shows you how these things are solved in the real world. And then you've got the comprehensive final exam, just to make sure you understand how everything fits together. So that's the breadth of the course, that again, you're two weeks in to 60 weeks. So you're just getting started. And so hopefully you'll be able to take these in sequence and it'll make sense. Before we go to answering any questions. But something, Chris, this event is open for everyone, both the students and verified students. Right. So this could be something to start with. What are the, what's the purpose of having verified the students and what is the MicroMessor program and. That's a good, okay, so. So all the courses are out there, you know, for free. So anyone can be taking these as an audit. And we always want to do that because one of our missions is to educate the world for free. So the videos, the quick questions, the practice problems, they're always out there for you. And everyone's more than welcome to take them. If you want to be credentialized, if you want an assessment, that takes a lot more work. And that's why you would need to be verified. So to be verified means that you're gonna be taking slightly more rigorous testing for your greatest assignments each week and for the midterm and final. And it allows you to have a credential. So you can take these things for free. That's fine if you just want to learn. Or if you want a credential to show someone, hey, I learned this, then you need to pay $150. And that's, depending on where you are in the world, that's either a ridiculously large amount of money or a ridiculously small amount of money. It's, to put it in comparison, it's about one, let's see, it's 1, 100th of what you would pay if you came here, right? So tuition at MIT is roughly $60,000 to $70,000 for the year. So you look at these courses, it's pretty small for what we're charging. But I understand other parts of the world, it's quite a bit of money. However, why do we charge that money? We charge that money because to make the assessment is non-trivial. We have to do a lot of work to make sure that there is no cheating going on and that is an accurate assessment. So every time you take one of the midterms or finals, those are new every time. So we have to constantly recreate those problems. That takes a lot of time and effort. And so you might ask, well, why is it worth getting verified? And I think it's worth it for a couple of reasons. More companies are starting to recognize it. Other universities are starting to recognize it and get credit for it, which is another reason why we have to be so accurate on the assessment. Plus also it lets a future employer see that, hey, I did this. So the credential has value and is gaining more value in the market. So the other benefit that you have for being verified is that we give you some supplemental materials. So if you look at each week, you hopefully you'll see that each week is identical in structure. There's always a welcome video. Me or the primary instructor will say something and introduce the topic. There'll be two lessons and each lesson is a set of videos and quick questions that are really simple, but just to make sure you're paying attention. And then there are practice problems and then there's a graded assignment. If you're a verified student, you also have a section called supplemental materials. Is that for micro masters? So if you're verified, you're considered to be a micro masters candidate because you're on your way to earn the verified certificates that you could then apply for the micro masters credential, which you need to complete all five courses plus the final. And so in these supplemental sections, we're not giving out answers to the graded assignments or anything, not buying the answers. We're giving you more material to supplement or compliment everything that you've done. Sometimes it'll be interviews, sometimes it'll be some other additional readings. A lot of times they're thesis projects from students here that are relevant to that week's lessons. We did that because many of the people doing the micro masters want to eventually go to grad school somewhere, whether it's here or in Zaragoza Spain or in Rochester Institute of Technology or in Curtin University or Queensland or the other universities that are accepting and recognizing the micro masters. So we think it's very important so that they see the type of project a grad student can do. So that's what's in those supplemental sessions. And also you have access to these hangouts that we'll do individually from this point on, just for the verified students. So we want to encourage you to become verified, not because we get additional money, because trust me, the money doesn't come to a modder myself, it goes to fund this whole endeavor, but it makes it for a better experience. Over the last three years, along the time we've been doing this, verified students routinely do better, stay longer and are more engaged. So by putting a little skin in the game, it makes you pay more attention and you get more out of the course. But again, it's all there for free if you want to just learn, because education is free, the credentializing takes some time and that requires an investment. So you can think of all the courses as being in one of two camps. It's either a learning module or it's an assessment module. It's in one of those two areas. So the video lessons, the quick questions to practice problems, that's 100% learning. And so for those, use the discussion form. It's a very good topic. So it's good to differentiate between the pure assessment part, which is midterm and final and the grade assignment and the practice problem and quick questions. Yeah, let me try and make that clear. So for the pure learning stuff, that's where we want you to learn, use the discussion form, ask your friends how to solve stuff. That's great and we encourage that. However, at the other extreme are the midterms and finals and those are pure assessment. So there's no real learning going on there. That's where we get to see, okay, did this person understand the concepts? Can they apply the methodologies? Do they understand things? And in those cases, as opposed to the practice problems, we'll only give you one or two chances. We won't tell you what the real answer is until after everything is due. We don't want you to use the discussion form. It's an honor violation if you do. We give you a specific email to ask clarification questions to us. So the assessment environment is very different from the learning environment. Pure learning is the practice problem, quick questions and the videos. Pure assessment is the midterm and the final. Now grade, the weekly grade assignments are kind of in the middle, right? And so for those, you still don't use the discussion form. You send questions you have on clarification to the TAs. However, at the end of when it's due, we'll release the full solutions. And so you learn after the fact. It's like a homework. So no collusion ahead of time, but afterwards you'll see the results and then the explanations for those. So grade assignments are kind of in the middle between learning and assessment. And so that's how we kind of structure and approach the whole course. So every course will look the same and structure just the content changes. Good. Chris, there's a question for you. Okay. Karan Kumar is asking, what's the difference between supply chain management and operation management? Yeah, operations management is a more general field. So it wasn't, who's your master's in OEM? Or O-R? Yeah, so there's a history of these things of how it's happened, how it's named. So a lot of times there's overlap between industrial engineering, operations management, operations research, and then supply chain management and all this. I'd say operations management is more general. It's any kind of operations, whether it's a service operation, manufacturing. Sometimes you put supply chain and operation research in operation management. Yeah. So supply chain is more focused on supply chain. So if you go to a company, there's a chief operating officer and there might be a supply chain officer. But if you go to a separate academia from practice, in practice, supply chain is the physical flow of product and you're working with your suppliers and your customers. Operations generally means operating within the manufacturing, generally. In academia, it depends on the university where it sits. Yeah. Do you agree? Yeah. So Juan Fernando Reyes asking, what scale would be valuable to develop to join business analytics with supply chain management? So business analytics, yeah, so it's a good question. That's a big area right now. Big data machine learning is a big buzzword right now. The best thing you can do is be able to conduct some kind of quantitative analysis. So I think the stuff in the second half of SC0X will help you the most because usually when you're dealing with data analytics or business analysis, you're dealing with large data sets, usually gonna be dirty and they're gonna have a stochastic nature to them. So you're gonna learn a lot about is how to deal with large data sets, statistical analysis, regression, be widely used and SC4X will probably be very valuable to you because as your data sets get bigger, spreadsheets just don't work anymore and you have to learn how to handle databases. So I think for data analytics, SC0X and 4X are the most important classes. What do you think? Does that make sense? Because one, zero teaches you the basic tools, four teaches you how to handle massive data sets. Yeah, it's basic but you need to learn about optimization, regression, statistical. But if you wanna get deeper and truly into analytics because we teach enough tools to understand supply chain management because the purpose of this course is to produce people who will be practitioners. We're not looking to produce PhDs and or pure business analytics because if you wanna get into an analytics position, you probably need to start programming some and maybe into R, look into R, look into some visualization tools like Tableau and start looking at some of those tools that are a little deeper. We won't go into that depth but that's the type of skills you're gonna need to get into, learn how to code in Python. Good, good. Chris, you mentioned about the softwares. So as you know, we cover some softwares softwares in SC0 like SAS, MPO, you know, spreadsheet and any logic later. Why we provide this number of softwares and do we suggest or encourage students to use one of them or? Yeah, so the first time we ran any of these courses, we did everything in Excel and Libre Office because Libre Office is free and most people, 90% of our students use Excel. But we found that we didn't wanna force people to do spreadsheets. And so the first time we ran this with a larger group of people, we introduced different types of software. So for optimization, you can use SAS or Ample which are widely used in practice. They're very widely used and we're able to get free versions for you guys. But so you get to pick. So the two are double-edged sword. If we just give you one piece of software then you kind of trapped. If we give you a wide selection then people feel they have to use them all. My recommendation, this is just a recommendation, you can do what you want, is be comfortable in spreadsheets. That makes sense, whether it's Excel, Google Sheets or Libre Office or some other version. But also you should be comfortable using other pieces of software and SAS might be a good one because what they're making, they're able to cover a wider range. And you're able to do it for free later on. Whatever company you go to, they might have their own version like that. Some companies might be using SPSS which is a very common statistics package. They might be using Cplex for their optimization. But once you learn one, you get pretty comfortable with it. So the learning curve of the first one can be steep. The second one's a little less. Simulation's the only weird one because simulation takes a lot of computing power. So we use something called AnyLogic which is very solid but it will use up all of your computing power on your computer. We warn you about that when you do it. You can do some simple simulations in spreadsheets but AnyLogic is much more detailed for a discrete event simulation. This doesn't mean that we are not aware of the other software that are available out there like for example for simulation arena is there, MATLAB is there, but for example, MATLAB is not free. We cannot build our course based on MATLAB. Well, interesting, we could make it free for while you're taking the course but you couldn't, it would be free afterwards. I didn't want to train you on something that you can't use afterwards. You can use it in the last one. And in fact, let me say some people in previous courses have programmed the solutions in R which is an open source coding language. And we decided not to incorporate because it's more coding and a lot of our students don't want to be coders, developers. It's not a user friend, yes, the other software. But if you're an analyst, if you want to be a business analyst, R is probably one of the best tools to have in your back pocket because it's open source so it's constantly growing because people keep adding packages to it and it's free. And now we have the real version of R so it looks good. Oh, really? I haven't used it for a long time. It's gonna make the other software. I grew up using SAS back in the 1980s and 90s and then SPSS for a long time and Cplex. But those are larger scale tools. But you can learn the concepts on a spreadsheet. Yeah, we've got a good question that someone says that as I have not used algebra in over 20 years. So yeah, can you recommend other supporting materials? That's true. So you know, this, what, 25,000 students so with different backgrounds, different backgrounds in math. Sure. So this should happen. This is why we have zero because what happened is when I was, the first course we did was SC1 it's the fundamental trade-offs course and I dived right in when people were saying, whoa, where's this calculus coming from? Because I assumed that people had a background so we created zero to hopefully bring people up to speed. So you probably have been using algebra you just haven't thought about it formally. So I'm sure you do it when you try to figure out the price of something. But having said that, the best reference, the best source that I can think of for learning any kind of basic math, even advanced math, it's the Khan Academy. KAHN, just Google Khan Academy, like Wrath of Khan, right, the Star Trek movie. But Khan, who was actually an MIT graduate, he started doing these videos for a niece and it just turned into this amazing program. It has really self-explanatory videos where all you see is his writing on the screen. He hand writes his writings much better than mine. I can't do that. But he explains things from in basic addition through algebra, through calculus all the way up, he covers every sort of topic and he does a really good job. So if you ever want to brush up on something, sometimes I do it. If I wanted to brush up on something I haven't used for a while, you can just go to Khan Academy, find the topic you want and 15, 20 minutes later, you feel refreshes you. I find it harder to learn from scratch but it's a really good way to refresh. That's right, do you have any other recommendations for that? Not a reference, but we do have some recitation besides the videos that you record. That's a really good point. And the fun, you know, not only that, so we are filming new recitation for this run and the next run. So we're trying to make it more clear, more explanation, cover kind of practice problem that we have with the software, the specific software. So we are trying our best to cover and film in new material. And not filming new material, but more explanation. Yeah, and one other thing about the software, I tried to make my lessons, the videos, software agnostic. For zero, I don't think I mentioned any specific software. I think I do spreadsheets once when I talk about simulation for a simple one. And I do that on purpose. The recitations are where you learn how to, you know, exactly how to use the software. We tried to keep that separate. We have a question. Miguel Fernández, really see a practical problem with transshipment of passengers, minimizing of routes and assigning vehicles in a single problem. Good. And SC2X, but it won't be for passengers. Yeah. We don't, so we're afraid, but you know, we can turn freight into people. There's some differences, but we'll talk more about the transshipment problem. I think we touched upon it in week four. Yeah, we have transshipment problem. Less than two. In week three, we cover transshipment problem. And in week four, we cover some transportation like a freight road problem, traffic citizen problem. So we get something. But do we put them all in one? So no, because in practice, those are solved at different time periods, generally. You can try to solve everything all at once, but usually the flow models are determined almost tactically and strategically. Daily routing problems are solved operationally. And so usually the plan feeds into that operations, but you could do them all at once. I mean, it just isn't as common. So we do a lot more of that in SC2X. You use a mix engineer linear program and to solve the network problem for the transshipment and then you can use a bunch of different heuristics or exact algorithms to solve a routing problem. And I also show how to approximate it, because that's another interesting approach where you don't have all the data you need. So how can I make a good approximation with as little data as possible? And I'll show how to do that in the second lesson of week four in SC0X. Good. Before going to Rick, we have one question from Duarte or Tega. My main concern is if the course of US recognition. I'm sorry? Say one more time. My main concern is if the course of US recognition. So I don't know exactly what you mean in Guadalajara. Maybe because of the units that we use, like pounds and not kilograms. Okay, yeah. So if that's what it is. Are you mean the certificate if this is a... So let me address both points. So the first one is when we first did these, they were very North American centric. Everything was actually in Boston or Massachusetts or whatever. We tried in future courses to always have things in different parts of the world, use different metric system, things like that. But we will be US centric. The concepts apply globally. So I will use a US and American phrase accidentally. And so if people get confused by those, they should use a discussion form. I try to minimize that. As far as the recognition of the diploma and everything. Interestingly, 70 to 80% of the students are taking this from outside the US. More universities outside the US are recognizing it than within. We're finding it not to be the case that it's just a pure USA recognition. To be honest, we've spent the last 2017, this year, finalizing all the content. What we're starting to do now is starting to promote it and work with different companies and different universities have recognized more. And we're not just staying in the US. I would argue that it's more widely recognized in other countries, to be honest. We're getting more and more universities approaching us and saying, hey, how can we use this? Because you have to understand, it takes a lot for a university to just blindly accept this. By doing this, they're saying that they accept what your guys are doing online, not in person as credit that they're giving away. So it's a big step for universities. For companies, we're starting to have more companies work with us directly. So we have a number of companies that enroll a number of their students, or their employees into the program, or we blend this where we have them do the course as well as some face-to-face things. So we're seeing it recognized more and more. And I'd say it's not just USA centric. Plus you have to realize it's less than a year old. I mean, the MicroMasters, the first one hasn't graduated yet. So we're still early on, just like a year or two weeks into the 60-week program, we won't graduate our first MicroMasters until the end of May. So once we get one class under our belt, let's see how we do. Great. So it's time to go to breakout rooms. Okay. And do something for them just to discuss about. Not really. I don't have anything. So what we typically do, we do these hangouts. When we talk about the content, we give a problem or a question for you guys to discuss. Because it's good for them just to discuss and bring the question to the lobby or the second half of the hangouts. So then we can discuss and answer the question. So what I would like for you to do in your breakout, go in there, you'll be able to see and hear each other. So introduce yourselves and talk about what your experiences are. And if you can come up with one question that you guys wanna ask collectively, when you're done, we'll give you about what Arthur, 10 minutes. Come back and just use the chat again, get us a question, we'll answer those questions. And then at the end of that, we'll just turn off the main room and we'll keep the break rooms open for a little while or an hour and you can continue to talk with each other. Again, this is a chance for you to see us live, not just my voice over PowerPoint, but also to talk to each other. Because for a remote, large-scale class like this, I think it's very important that you get some contact with each of your fellow students. So let's go to the breakouts. I'm gonna be back in 10 minutes. Okay.