 Hi, learners. Thank you very much for joining our live event. Good morning or good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. You're really excited to have you. And I'm with Dr. Eva Ponce. She is executive director of the supply chain micromasters program at MIT. She oversees the five courses that hopefully you know a lot about by now. And that will basically comprise the micromasters credential. She's also a research scientist at Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT. And her research focus is on omnichannel retailing and specific network design issues in there. She also has 15 years of research and experience in different institutions. Eva, we are really happy to have you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. So with that, I'm going to start our slides. But I also want to invite you all to use the Slido any time during the presentation to ask your questions and answer the polls. And the code, one theme, the code is SC1X. Yeah. Great. So today we're going to have some, we're going to start by showing you the big picture about the micromasters program and also specifically some background and information about the SC1X, a little bit about course logistics. Hopefully we don't need to focus on that a lot. Then we will move to inventory management challenges in omnichannel. Eva will explain her research and expertise in omnichannel and how inventory management concepts that you will learn in this course will be instrumental for omnichannel retailers. At the end, we will have a discussion and a wrap up. And again, we will also answer all your questions that are coming live. Thank you very much. Excellent. So welcome again to SC1X. We are, as Sina mentioned, we are very excited to have you all attending this event. Welcome also to the SCX community. This is a huge community of learners. So we have almost a quarter of a million of learners that take at least, that took at least one SCX courses. 15,000 of these learners are verified learners. We have issued so far 23,000 certificates. Micromasters holders, we have 1,162. This August, we are going to have another CFX, comprehensive final exam. So we expect to add more Micromasters holders to this Micromasters pipeline of learners. So our learners, as you know, this is a global program. So our learners from all over the world, across the world, from more than 196 countries are represented in our Micromaster program. This is the distribution of the countries. The most represented country is still United States, following by India. United States represent 20% of our learners. India represents 14%. And then we have Brazil gaining and gaining a quote here for more than 4% of our learners. Mexico and Canada with more than 3% of the learners. And then Europe is also very well represented. And we also have students from Australia, from Africa and from all over the world. So a little bit more about the program. Now you are enrolled in SC1X. This is the second course as part of the Micromaster program. So in total, the Micromaster includes five SCX courses. At the end, you are asked to pass a comprehensive final exam. This will be a proctor exam that you need to complete and pass before earning the Micromaster credential. In terms of the big picture and the contents, most of you already completed and passed SC0X supply chain analytics. This first course, as you know, is more like the toolbox is the way where we teach and you learn the basic tools in supply chain management. So in SC1X, let's say that it's a much more applied course. Our approach is very industry oriented and all of the problems we are providing here for you to solve are real problems or realistic problem, let's say in this way. In SC1X, the main goal is to go through the basic trade-offs in a supply chain, mainly in between cost and service level. We will cover demand forecasting, inventory management, transportation management, and in all of these main topics, you will deal with these trade-offs in between cost and service level and how to deal with that. In the next course, supply chain design, we focus more on the network design of supply chains. We will cover also here some relevant concepts in finance, also say the supply relationships procurement and some concepts about procurement and purchasing. In SC3X, we deal more with complexity and how to deal with complex and global supply chains. Finally, in the last course, as part of the MicroMaster, we deal with big data, how to manage big data, we will also review machine learning techniques, and then we go through the ERP system, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, TMS, Transportation Management System, Warehouse Management System, and all of these systems, IT systems that help supply chains to manage the information flows. So these are mainly the three courses, the five courses. The three first courses are, let's say, much more quantitative and the two last courses are more qualitative and all of them, as I mentioned, are very industry-oriented. And finally, the comprehensive final exam at the end of the journey. In terms of the value proposition, so one of the main thing that our learners are completing this program is because of the individual professional career development, is in order to apply for a job in supply chain, in order to promote in the company for a different position in supply chain. Some companies are also using this program as a way to train their team and their employees in supply chain management, is also a pathway to master's degrees at MIT or at any other universities. Okay, so in terms of the universities that are recognizing the MicroMaster, there are currently more than 10 universities that are using the MicroMaster as a pathway for credits. MIT is one of these universities. We have what we call the blended master degree program. And this means that once you complete the MicroMaster, you can apply to the blended program master degree and you only need to spend one full semester at MIT in order to earn this master degree. Same thing with other universities. We have Purdue University, Duane University, some universities in Australia, University of Queensland, Deakin University or Caching University. Some universities also in Latin America, University of San Francisco de Quito, Galileo in Guatemala. More and more, Brazil, USP is also considering that now. So more and more, Bolivia is also trying to join with an agreement with us. So we have more and more universities that are in the process of recognizing the MicroMaster as a pathway of credit. So these are some different benefits to earn the MicroMaster program. And now let's move to a deeper dive in SE1x. So Sina, the course lead of SE1x is going to provide you these latest statistics and the plan for the next weeks. Okay. Thank you, Eva. Excellent. All right, so if you can move this a little bit. Yeah. Yes. So first another note that we are using Slido. You could use, you could go to slido.com or slido.do. Both of them will route you to the same thing and use the SE1x code to enter the application and answer the polls and also submit your questions. We will try to answer them as they come in and disperse them. So we have one question for you. So why did you enroll in SE1x? Supply to fundamentals. Tell us whether it was your employer's suggestion, whether you founded yourself, whether you want to find a better job or whatever. So the poll is already on, on the Slido, so please take a moment and respond to that. Okay, while you're working on it, I'm going to share some statistics with you. In SE1x, right now we have a significant number of learners enrolled, 14,568 people, that's huge. 805 people are verified learners and they represent 173 countries. Important note, enrollment closes today at 1500 UTC, which has already passed, but hopefully anyone who was interested in enrollment had a chance to do that. More importantly, verification closes next week. So if you're planning to become a verified student, make sure you do that before the deadline. Don't wait until the last minutes because things like payment issues or website issues may happen, so make sure you give it enough time. And then we have 12 wonderful CTAs in this course that are volunteers that help you, help answer your questions in discussion forum and give us feedback about what you think, what learners think about the course, what are the bigger questions happening, so we could improve the course that way and learn about and hear basically your voice as well. So, yeah, so let's go back to the poll, wonderful. 48 responses. 48 responses, great, that's great. So most of you have said that I'm enrolled for my own personal development, wonderful. The next biggest group is I'm interested in pursuing a master's degree, that's wonderful. This program is a great first step if you wanna enter a master's degree. Yeah, as I mentioned, MIT is an option but also Zaragoza as part of the global network scale at MIT, in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur, there is an accelerated way to earn a master's degree on the other universities. All of the detailed information you will find in the SEM website, SEM MicroMasters website and you have the links to those universities, you are interested in that, yeah. And some of you have some of them switching careers or planning to do, so that's also a great way to do that. Supply chain jobs are, there's no sign of them decreasing, the market is expanding, demand is increasing for supply chain professionals, so you've basically made a great choice. Yeah, and I want to add here that we have a great examples of learners, previous learners that were working in marketing, in finance, in different fields. Finally, they got a job in supply chain management. One of these learners got a job in Akamai here in Cambridge, in Kendall Square, another of our learners got in a manufacturing company. So there are some examples of people that move from one field to the supply chain management and then now they are working as a professional in supply chain management, which is great. Excellent, so let's continue. All right, so we have another question for you. Yes. So what do you expect to learn in SC1X? Tell us what are the concepts that you're interested in that you're hoping to learn in this course? Yeah, perfect. So I'll give you just a couple of seconds before I go over what we will actually cover. Okay, so we will cover three major topics, demand forecasting, inventory management and transportation management. Together these are the most important core skills of supply chain managers. So you can, most likely any company you go in they will have to understand demand and have a forecast for it. They will, if they're working with physical products they definitely have inventory management, definitely have transportation management. So mastery of these techniques will give you a leg, will give you an edge in a lot of the companies that you're going to work for. In terms of demand forecasting, we will cover the cutting edge tools for predicting demand. We're working with time series which will basically use the patterns of past to predict future. We will also cover causal analysis and we will also cover special cases which are very important because a lot of textbooks covered the general aspects but when the special cases happen you need to have a deeper understanding to basically treat them. Then we will move to inventory management. Again, inventory management is in this core tree that very comprehensively so we will cover anything from deterministic demands to stochastic demand and also single period models and multi-period models. We will cover special cases again and also warehousing topics. Finally, we will cover transportation management, fundamentals of transportation, vehicle routing and the challenges in there and also how transportation links with inventory in terms of lead time variability and other topics. So by the end of this course you should have a very deep understanding of the most important parts of supply chain management and the tools you will learn here are the tools that supply chain professionals use every day. So this will be what you learn in the course is gonna be your good friend for quite a while. Excellent. So yeah, let's see the results of the first pool. Oh, great. Here we have the world cloud. Yeah, so what do you expect to learn? Forecasting, inventory, demand, supply chain. Excellent. Data. Data, great. So yes, you are going to have a lot of forecasting techniques, demand forecasting, a lot of inventory management as Sina told you. Some of transportation management techniques too. Yeah, perfect. More and more answers are coming. Great, practical approach. Yeah, as we mentioned all of the problems that we have created for you are based on real problems or at least realistic problems. So yeah. So one thing I wanna mention is that a nice thing about CTL is, and a particular increase is that he has many years of practical work. So a lot of the examples and the definitions that he and explanations that he brings to the course are actually coming from real experiences. So that is very, very valuable. Make sure you use that opportunity. If you have any questions that are related to practice, definitely us or Chris can answer at some point. And this is not something that you can get very, very easily in a traditional classroom. Okay, we have another question for you. Yeah, is which topic interested you most of the three main topics we have called demand forecasting, inventory management or transportation management. So vote for that. And then let's review the courses schedule and the verification deadlines. All right. So while you're replying to the poll, a couple housekeeping notes. Well, we started the course in June 27th and we will finish on 26th of September. Enrollment deadline, as I said, is 18th, which is today. Do we still have time or is there a grace meeting or it's already closed? Okay, no. Because it was supposed to be closed at 1500 UTC. Verification, we still have one full week. So make sure you take advantage of that. Meet term, very, very importantly, is going to be open 8th of August and is due 15th of August. There is no way we could extend the deadline. So make sure you plan accordingly. And it's also very big chunk of your grade. So you will have a week. So hopefully everyone can find a good slot of time to basically take that exam. But again, know that the system does not allow us to make any changes to that timing. And one more thing is a time exam. So the maximum duration of the exam is four hours. It's good that you reserve for at least four hours or a little bit more in order to go through the exam. You might not need the full four hours, but I would recommend to at least reserve for as lot of time that cover the whole duration of the exam. Yeah, you know these dates now. So mark in your calendar. I'm booked for some of these slots. Yeah. Yeah. So we have one question that I don't wanna miss. Yeah. As her says, or Azhar says, I've missed the C0X, can I have access to it still? Okay, so yes, this is from Azhar. So the question is, we really encourage you, we highly encourage you to take the courses in order in the sequence starting with zero, one, two, three, and four. However, can you take a C1X without taking a C0X? The answer is yes, you are allowed to do that. I would say that this depend on the math background that you have. Some of our learners have a very strong math background. So for this learner that's really already went through statistics techniques, regression techniques, probability and these kinds of things should be fine. You should be okay. We also provide the key concept document of the previous course in the current course. That means that once you start a C1X, I really encourage you and recommend you to go through the key concept document for a C0X in order to refresh, in order to fix some of the previous contents. Having said that, is doable? Yes, some of our learners do that. It's always better to do in sequence, but it's possible. Okay. Another learner is asking, their name is Global, which I don't think that's a real name. So also make sure you use your name so we know who the question is asking. But he's asking or she, what are some career paths available after completion of SCMP Masters? So I've been hearing a lot of great examples of students getting hired in the best companies. I've heard Amazon, Walmart, what was? Yeah. Macassan and all. Yeah, so definitely. The learners get, most of them get a very good job in supply chain, the supply chain management field. For the blended program, 50% of our learners are from all over the world, and not from the United States. And most of them come back to their countries. I need to say that OPT is something that is not something that we can grant through the blended program because you only spend one full semester on campus. So it's a question that is not possible to grant you an OPT. But most of the blended students come here and then they get a promotion in their current jobs, in their companies, or they move to a different companies, in their countries, or in any other countries. So yeah. I would say that I think almost all of them are working now and are working or about to start working. They graduate last June, yeah, and they are all of them working in different companies. So that's great, yeah. All right. So let me take a quick look at the questions and see if there's something that we can urgently for now. Okay, so let's continue. With the verification, yeah. So as Sina mentioned, there is only one more week to verify. For those, the question of the verification is if you have a clear idea that you want to pursue for a certificate in UC1X, or you want to be part of the MicroMaster program, then it's mandatory that you upgrade your status to be a verified student. There is the only way to earn a certificate in the SCX courses. So if this is your case, if you have a clear idea that you want to pursue for the certificate, then we really encourage you to do as soon as possible. Don't wait until the very last minute because we always see some issues with the payments, some issues with the platforms, some issues with many things. And after the due date, unfortunately, due dates are hardwired in the systems and we cannot extend that. So please, if you are interested, let's do that. If you just want to go through the videos and the main practice rolling on quick questions, but you are not interested in the certificate, then you don't need to become a verified student. It's only to pursue for a certificate. We also provide some supplemental material for verified students and life events. The second and the third life event is only for verified students. How to proceed here? You just need to pay the $200. This is the first step. And the second step is the ID verification. So the ID verification is you need to show an ID card with your name and your picture in the same card. This name should match with the name that you have included in your edX platform, in your profile. With that, you should be okay. But there are two steps. It's not only pay, it's pay plus the ID verification. And both the steps are mandatory in order to earn a certificate in the course. Yeah. Any question here? Contact directly with edX support because edX is the organization that is managing the ID verification and all of the payment issues directly with you. So any issue with the ID or the verification process, you should go to info at edX.org. Great. Wonderful. Yeah. Okay, so let's move to the SCX learning experience. So in this SCX courses, we have two different spaces, the learning space. In this space, you will find videos, quick questions and practice problems. This is a material that everyone can have access, audit and verify learners. We really encourage collaboration here. The discussion forum is the space that we encourage you to use in order to post your question, any question related to the content. If you read the news related to something happening in the supply chain management and you find this interesting, share with your peers, it's a great way to collaborate with your peers, to learn from your peers. Most of our learners, they already have SCM experience, experience in supply chain management. I found myself very, very helpful and also useful to go to the forum and learn from this community of SCX learners. Yeah, the SINA is monitoring that and he's participating in the forum. The teaching assistant are there, the MIT staff are there, and also your CTAs, the community teaching assistant. Our amazing community of teaching assistant are helping there, moderating this forum. So take advantage of that. I really encourage you to go to the discussion forums. And then we have assessment. Assessment is an individual thing. Unfortunately, it's not a group thing. And it's an individual. That means that we need to assess your knowledge, not the knowledge of a group or a study group. So in this sense, you will have a great assignment every single week, 20% of the total grades. You will have meter, 35% of the total grades and a final exam, the 45% of the total grades. And this is a peer assessment. So if you have any question related to the meter, final or any grade assignment, you should send an email directly to the SE1xhelp.mit.edu email account. We do not allow any posts in the forum or in any other means about grade assignment, meter, final exam. We do not allow collaboration here. We really follow the owner code very seriously. So please don't post anything related to that in the forum or any other means. So any question about graded material, whether graded assignments or midterm or final, they're not allowed on the forum. Yeah, directly through the email account. The teaching assistants are monitoring that. The course lead is also there. We are taking care of every single email we receive. So we will go through that, but in an individual way, not in any other... Let me also add one more thing. Sure. When you email us in order to get the quickest answer, make sure you include as much information as possible. So tell us exactly what question, what lesson, if it's a video, tell us what part of the video, what slide or what minute, or if you have a problem in solving one of the questions, maybe share your screenshot, tell us, share your Excel file basically help us put yourself in our shoes and ask the question, with this information, is this person is going to be understanding what I did and are they going to be able to answer it? If the answer is yes, then go ahead. But if not, give us as much information as possible so we could give you the quickest answer without a back and forth to email dad. We really appreciate that. So we have a few questions coming up. Sure, let's go through that. Okay, I'm a chemical engineering graduate and I want to know how the scores will help me in the field in particular. So, for Anita. Chemical engineering. So I would say, for Anita, this depends on... She's a graduate, but it's still not working, seems, no? Okay, so there are many chemical companies and they are coming here to CTL sharing with us the distribution challenges with their products. There are some issues related to chemical companies. This typically has those materials behind. There is a lot of regulation to complain to meet to... So, yeah, supply chain management is needed for sometimes to manage the production process in the plant for the distribution part. I would say that distribution is one of the big part of these chemical companies. So I would say that either in production or in manufacturing or in distribution. Yes, absolutely. Two main parts that I see here. So you have knowledge of the product itself, but that's not gonna help customers. Firms need to be able to produce it and move it and give it to the retailers and maybe other businesses. So that's where you can combine your deep knowledge of the product with business knowledge about how products move and how products are made. So if you combine those, then that will give you the opportunity to actually move up in the industry, in the chemical industry. You cannot manage a factory without knowing the details of operations, details of inventory or how to receive stuff and how to move stuff. So that's very important. Even higher levels, you can be a supply chain manager in chemical industry and so forth. This related to SC1X, related to SC2X, there are some decisions related to where to locate the plants, the chemical plants that network design models can also help to make this decision. This is covering SC2X. So yeah. So as I was asking the follow-up question, is it necessary to complete SC0X to get MicroMaster Certificate? Yes, it's mandatory. You need to pass and complete as a verified learner the five SCX courses plus the CFX in order to earn the MicroMaster Credential, yeah. So do you need to finish all courses in 2018 to get the, to enroll the final exam, CFX? Yes, it's mandatory. Yes, to take the CFX, the comprehensive final exam, it's mandatory to have completed the five SCX courses and pass the five SCX courses as a verified student in order to be eligible to take the CFX. Only those learners who already passed the five courses can take the CFX. Okay. This one I'm going to take. Parnita is asking the follow-up question. I'm a verified student of this course. How long after the course will the certificates be available? Two weeks. Typically, yes. I would say that within two weeks, you will have that sometimes much earlier, but yeah, within two weeks. Okay. Bindu asking what is on the channel, we will cover that. Also, Kuryan is asking about machine learning and technologies, SAP. We will cover that later. Yes, in the discussion part. Does, so Yushi is asking, does blended program graduate qualify for TN visa for Canadians? I'm not sure. I'm not sure about this answer, Yushi. What I'm sure is that OPT, we cannot provide OPT because you only spend one full semester with the blended program. For the SEM residential program, that is a 10 month program at MIT, OPT is allowing a student get the OPT. For the blended, this is not happening. And regarding this specific thing, I do not know the answer. You should have this consultation to directly with the international office. Yeah. Okay. So let's move on. Yes. We will come back to the rest of the question later. Yeah. And we have about 45% of our learners, they are interested in demand forecasting. So these are your weeks. Yeah, this week, next week, until when? Until week four? Yes, yes. So yeah, you have two more weeks about demand forecasting, great. And we are covering demand forecasting deeper than other institutions that I've seen. So we will cover more topics that are hopefully giving you a bigger tool set. It's more challenged, but at the end, you will be able to handle a lot more different situations in practice. And around 35% of the learners are interested in inventory management. And we also dedicated some weeks to inventory management. So you will understand all of the inventory policies and implications and the trade-offs behind these different inventory policies. And 22% transportation management, great. Perfect. So let's come back to the courses. Yeah, do you want to continue? The course content, already a lot of you know about this. We have a combination of videos. The good thing about those is that they're transcribed. You can go back, you can pause, you can pace them, you can make them faster. Then we will have slides and also the videos from around the world, different topics that have been curated, selected very carefully. Chris particularly has spent a lot of time creating those videos. And again, according to my experience and the residential ones, these are very, very good content discovered. So basically there is less, I mean, the contents are very compressed. So a lot of very good things are taught to you in a short amount of time. So this saves time and also helps you cover the major factors. And an interesting thing that the MicroMasters program in SCM has introduced is the use of sandboxes. So these are the interactive problems that are placed on the web and you can go play with them, change the parameters and see how the outcome changes. The beauty of these problems is that you can apply your knowledge and you can test them. You see real-time feedback of the changes you make as a manager or as a professional, as a professional. So make sure you use these. Again, we have an IT team that works on these. They spend a lot of energy on these and we really hope that this really enrich your learning experience and we are also open to learning about your feedback. Yes. Yeah, these are interactive problems. As Sina mentioned, are fun problems and we are very proud because Connor Makowski, he's the digital learning as part of the MicroMaster team and his team has worked on that for some months. They developed these tools. We think they are fun in order to apply the concepts. Great. Excellent. So let's move forward to the discussion forum. So discussion forum, we really want you to use this space. It's a way, as we mentioned, to interact with your peers, to pose your questions to, maybe sometimes I learn from our learners that they discover the discussion forum because they have some specific question about one video or one specific concept and they say, hey, I'm struggling with that. Then they went through the forum and was a very similar question there. So it was a great way to see another peers with the same question and sometimes the CTAs, sometimes the course lead, but sometimes your peers answering this question. And this is always good to share these questions, these doubts that you can have and interact with your peers. So yes, I encourage you to use these resources. Okay. Then we have live events, surprise. So you, for now, you know how it works. So we will try to invite experts in the field. Today, as you know, we are gonna talk about Omni Channel. In the other live events, we will talk about different concepts depending on where we are in the course and we may have external experts or some basically industry managers as well. So those will only be open to verify the students, make sure you make use of those as a great opportunity. You can still have this live Q&A with them. So we really hope you enjoy those as they come. Excellent. Okay. So yeah, time for questions and answers. Do not hesitate to post your questions through Slido. We will go through it. So let's see what we have here. We have quite a bit of questions. So, are pin, are we pin? Yes. Does the blended, no. No, we'll start off. Is the format of the midterm final, midterm or final exam the same as that of graded assignments? How many questions and how many, someone moved her, okay. How many questions and how much time do we have to complete the midterm and final? So typically the format is similar. It's not the same. As you know, these exams are timed. So that's a big difference. You typically have four hours to complete those and a week to submit for graded assignments. It's not timed and you will have two weeks. So it's tighter in that sense. Usually we will have four problems, but we will plan it such that it doesn't need four hours. Our plan will actually be target somewhere about two hours. So four hours should be plenty, but still you should be very, very prepared. If you don't get a good score on midterm and particularly on final, you will have a very hard time because all the graded assignments only add up to about 20% of course. So, but that said, if they're not gonna be hard, we actually, when we create problem with test them, many different people test them from different levels of knowledge, new people, more experienced people. So we make sure they have the appropriate level of difficulty and you will not see any surprises. It will be exactly the things that we covered, maybe bigger problems or slightly more complex problems than GAs, but nothing too different. Yeah, I would say that go through the practice problems and the GA, I think is the best way to prepare for the midterm and the final exam. So try to solve the practice problem by yourself, go through the grade assignment. It's only the 20% of the total grade in this course, but it's the best way for you to be prepared for the midterm and the final. And the goal is not to provide a super complex midterm or final exam. It's just to assess that you have the appropriate knowledge to pass this course and to earn the certificate and that you have these basic concepts that we have been taught during the different weeks. So these are the main purpose of the midterm and final. Our time exam, as Sina mentioned, so you need to allocate a book for this specific as a lot of time, four hours midterm, four hours the final, always should take less on that, but at least book for these four hours. Just in case you can go through the problems you can review, double check, be sure that you submit your answers because if not, you are not going to be graded based on your solution and that's all. But the results in general are pretty high results and very good performance. So those learners that really watch the videos go through the practice problem and solve the grade assignment, let's say the percentage of success is really, really high. So I would say that those students that do not complete the grade assignment or do not review the whole contents of the course are the ones that are more struggling. But if you go through the course and you schedule for time to review your videos and solve your practice problem, you should be fine. We usually have quite a number of people scoring 100%. You can definitely do it, but you have to make sure you understand every single practice problem and graded assignment. We have one important question. And then we are going to move to the discussion. Han-Dakkar Rafi, who did asking, is it effective to learn supply chain management online? Oh, great question. That's a very good question. We know that something we know is face-to-face interaction matters and people learn from interaction. With that being said, there are several things that you can do online with much lower costs and much more efficient, more flexible that's not possible in the classroom setting. Particularly if any concept that is a formula or a technique or a skill, these are very good for automation and putting them online because we can have a very well-rounded experience and an expert in the field to teach that to you. And you will have supplemental materials. You can stop the videos, you can go back and watch them as many times as you can. It also fits your schedule. So those are the benefits of online education and that work well for tools and skills. But for anything that's interpersonal or social capabilities, leadership capabilities, obviously you definitely need that in-person interaction. So that's why universities still exist, right? But we have found ways to put anything that we can online. And you may argue that in some aspects, online classes are at least as good or better than classroom experience, but that's my own opinion. It's also a function of your learning style. I personally value the flexibility more, but there are also a lot of people who need to actually be in class. They need a schedule, they need that weekly class to basically move them forward. So there's also that personal aspect to it. Yeah, in terms of the online learning, I want to highlight one thing that has a really a high impact on the learning experience that is the immediate feedback. So when you are taking an online course, you can watch the videos, you can solve practice problem, you can solve grade assignment, and you can, for the practice problem, you, quick questions, you are going to have immediate feedback about the answer and explanation of this specific problem. And this, from the learning perspective, is something very powerful. And I think that contributes a lot in terms of learn more about the certain concept. I think that for those, for instance, to explain the EUQ model or to explain any quantitative tool that you have a bunch of problems to apply the concept and practice yourself in a flexible way with immediate feedback is really, really powerful. I was really, I was very positive surprise about how powerful online learning can be for certain techniques and certain concepts. Having said that, I fully agree with Sina that there are certain skills that we still need to be in person. The interaction to discuss complex problems once we add complexity to our problem is really difficult to go online because online education should be very straightforward. There are not too much space for gray. It's more black or white. So for numerical problems, it's perfect. For multiple choice or checkbox assessment, it's great. But for those things that are more open-ended questions or need more discussion, interaction is still very powerful. And negotiation, leadership, these kinds of soft skills are still needed for professionals. And we still, what we believe is that the combination of online and in person is very powerful. And based on the results that we have with the first cohort of the blended student, we can say that the results are very good. We had outstanding cohort of learners that learn a lot and take a lot of advantage for combining both walls, the online plus the on campus. Okay, so there are also three questions that are similar. I'm gonna quickly cover that because we also need to move forward. The questions are about machine learning and Python and technologies overall. Do you need Python in supply chain? The short answer and that's my opinion, definitely. I worked at Walmart e-commerce for a while and while I was trained as a supply chain professional and I knew inventory, I know transportation and everything, but I found a lot of my time being spent on programming. That's surprisingly. And that was a big surprise to me. I was working with databases because there was no one who would support me with the data I need for my mathematical model, for my inventory model. So I had to do that pieces myself. So if you know those, that will give you an edge and also it will allow you to automate a lot of the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis and basically understand how things work. A lot of the applications in supply chain management are linked to databases or linked to other technologies in the company. So a better understanding of these will definitely help you understand how things work in the business, okay? Yeah, there are one question. What are the maximum students allowed for the blended program each year? It's 40, 40 students is the maximum number of a student that we are admitted per cohort, 40, 42. Okay, let's move to the omnichannel discussion. Yeah, so with that, I... Let me just ask, there are still some questions that we couldn't answer. We will do our best to answer this in maybe under the YouTube event. And so come back later and see those. Yeah, or maybe at the end if we have the chance to go through that. So regarding the omnichannel discussion, what they want is just to connect here. One of the topics that is one of the main challenges that retailers, manufacturers and different actors in the supply chain has nowadays. And this is when they are planning to expand their distribution channels and they are considering to move online or if they are a pure player and are considering to move more physical. But this at the end, those companies that are considering to move online or offline and combine these different channels in what we call omnichannels. So there are many different challenges here, but one of these challenges is the how to deal with the inventory management. And since in SE1X, you are going to cover a lot about inventory demand forecasting and inventory management. And both things are really tricky on each channel because for demand forecasting, we also need to be able to have a good model in order to predict the demand for each of the channels that we are going to offer. And in terms of the inventory, we are going to see why inventory management is one of the main challenges in omnichannels. So, and this is just to bring here the discussion and make you think about real challenges in the industry for retailers nowadays and how these connect with the contents you are reviewing in SE1X and as part of the MicroMaster program too. Okay, so the growth of e-commerce is something that is happening in all of the countries, in all of the continents. Some data about the United States, online sales are growing 15% a year versus 1.5% for overall retail sales. So it's really growing faster than other channels. In the chart, you can see since the year 2000 how e-commerce has been growing. But if we have a look to the year 2007, we can see that after 2007, the increase of e-commerce was really higher than in the previous year. So my first answer for you is what happened? What happened in 2007 that might be one of the reasons of this increase of e-commerce in the next year. So I'm going to give you some minutes to answer to these questions. I want also to highlight that this figure represent different industries, the footwear, toys, small appliances. We can see the same trend in all of these industries. So let's have a look to the poll. It's starting now. So go back to Slido and find a poll. Yes. And answer it there. Yeah, one more figure here. Last year, online sales accounted for 7.3% of total retail sales. Yeah, as I mentioned, this is growing. UK was one of the countries that was leaving e-commerce and the percentage of online sales. United States, this is growing more and more every single year and gaining more market share, online sales. I would say most of the countries, also in India, in China, and we have very good examples of marketplaces. Amazon is one of the most well-known companies. That's in China, we have Alibaba, another marketplace that is growing. In India, we have Flipkart. Rakuten. Rakuten. In Japan, Rakuten has been bought by Walmart recently. So yeah, and we are also seeing how traditional Rika mortars are moving to this space and how traditional pure players are moving to the Rika mortars space. So it's a very interesting environment. Let's see, the introduction of the smartphones. Yes, this is the answer. Okay, great. So let's go to that. Yeah, this is what happened. In 2007, Apple announced the first iPhone, more and more companies introduced smartphones. The combination of these smartphones plus internet connectivity, plus 40% of the population has an internet connection today allows people to buy from almost anywhere. So from my point of view, mobile commerce is one of the drivers, is one of the trigger in order to disincrease the e-commerce and also omni-channel. So let's have a very quick look to the retail buying, processing omni-channel. There are different stages here or steps. The discovery, the search, when we buy the transaction, when we purchase the product delivery and return. So when we are talking about omni-channel and when we are adding these new mobile devices, what happens is we can't discover and we can search anywhere for any product. Then we can also buy from anywhere. We can buy from, whichever, we can buy from work, we can buy from home, we can buy while we are waiting for the tea or the bus or the train. So we can buy almost from anywhere. And what is happening now with the delivery is that customers are almost asking to be delivered to almost anywhere. This is only true, to be honest, if we are in a city. So anywhere deliveries or anywhere returns are only allowing a city. If we live still in rural areas, this is not fully covered. But in any case, what I want to highlight here is that in every single step of this buying process, we have different options that can happen anywhere. And this at the end, it complicates things. And then the retailers need to manage the different channels that are crossing each other in an integrated way. So this is like the main point here. And if you have a look to the chart, you can see this mess, this chart at the end represent this mess and this combination of different channels in each of these steps. So this is one of the things I want to highlight. This is just a basic definition of OmniChannel. And when we are talking about OmniChannel, we are talking about combining digital and physical commerce. And we are trying to offer a customer experience that is called like a seamless journey. This seamless journey is only possible if we are at the end supporting the back end of the supply chain. And we need to integrate the different channels that they mentioned and need to be integrated because when we are talking about multi-channel, our companies that are offering also different channels but as a completely separate channels. When we are talking about OmniChannel, we are talking about integrated these different channels. The supply chain management plays a relevant role here. We run here at CTL around table about OmniChannel. And one of the main takeaways was that when a company decide to implement an OmniChannel strategy, we need to have supply chain management department involved in that. Ideally, leaving this implementation. If not, at least need to be 100% involved in this implementation because in order to make this happen, we need that the back end of the supply chain is working for this OmniChannel strategy. So this was one of the... I have one quick question for you. What are the key challenges that retailers need to... I'm going to open the poll now. Need to face in an OmniChannel retail environment. And I propose you some of the main challenges that we identify in this round table here at CTL. How to manage the returns, where to prepare the orders, where should the order meet the customers or how to deliver. So make your selection, make your choice. In the meantime, what I'm going to do is I'm going to review some of the main challenges in OmniChannel. We have one of these challenges is related to information and another one is related to fulfillment. We have the traditional retailers in the... that are, for instance, Walmart or Target or any of these companies that offer the product through the store, also the pickup and the fulfillment happening in the store, the peer players like Amazon and then we have a combination of hybrid models. These companies that are offering information online pick up in the store, click and collect. And Home Depot is one of these examples, for instance. A new business model. Those companies that are offering the store as a way to go try the product that you cannot buy. So in terms of inventory, there is no inventory in this showroom in order to sell the products. They just allow you to try the products and then from a centralized distribution center or a fulfilled fulfillment dedicated center, they make the delivery to these online orders. Okay, so this is just to let you think about that. I think we are running out of time. So let's have a look to your answers. Where should the order meet the customer? Yeah, this is one of the main challenges because this is related with the different channels that the retailer need to decide to offer to their customer. This has a lot of implication and one of the main implication is how to manage the inventory. And in terms of inventory, I would say that inventory visibility is one of the main things that companies that want to move into our new channel need to achieve. Inventory accuracy is also very important here because we really need to know the amount of products that we have if the product is available and through which channel is this product available. And this is going to affect many other decisions like shipping decisions and decisions about the channel we are offering to our customer. So inventory accuracy, inventory visibility and the integration between offline and online is also one of the main challenges that these traditional retailers that are moving into online are facing today. So the number one challenge in moving to OmniChannel that a lot of companies have is management of inventory in general, issues of visibility. A lot of companies don't know exactly how much of that product they have in all, either the stores or at the centralized warehouse. So, and it's not, they can't easily solve this because they need to improve their forecasting model, they need to improve their infrastructure, and they need to change all the legacy databases. So that is one of the biggest hurdles in front of the companies. Hopefully with the methods you will learn in this course, you will be able to contribute to that piece as well. Excellent. Okay, so I think we are running out of time, Sina. So we have some more questions on the lobby, what we are going to do is trying to answer these questions through a slide on, yeah? And yeah, any final question we want to address here? So let's take a quick look if there's something that we can address right now. So what are the fee for giving exam $200 professional? Let's see, what is the candidate? One person had asked, and I forgot to answer this, how does Twitter machine learning is going to replace traditional forecasting models? To some extent, yes, because machine learning models are very, very powerful. But the problem they have is they're, most of them are black boxes. So you don't know what happened, you get a very good prediction, but you don't exactly know what are the factors that caused it. That is also very important to know what factors are driving the demand. So for that, still the traditional models, particularly regression models are very, very useful, and definitely not never going to basically go away. But still machine learning is a great compliment to those. Okay, so final words from my side, just encourage you to go through AC1X if you are interested in the certification, verify it as soon as possible. And in terms of the contents, very happy to see that you are interested in demand forecasting, inventory management. As you see, for instance, if you are talking about on the channel, these two are very relevant topics that all of the tools that you are going to review in AC1X might help you to better manage doing a more efficient and accurate way in this new environment that we have with more challenges for all of the actors in the supply chain. So with that with AC1X, we are always open to your feedback, to your questions, reach us through AC1X help, reach me directly if you have any feedback that you want to share. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you very much, Eva. Thank you all for joining. Thank you.