 Welcome. Welcome everyone to the fourth and final Hangout event for SC4X. I'm Eva Ponce, with me is... Chris Kappas, you should know me by now. Yeah, we are very happy. This is our last final event in this course. So the idea today is I'm going to start with the debrief of the fresh connection, the simulation game that you played in SC4X. Then Chris is going to wrap up SC4X and discuss a little bit with you the polls and the results of the discussion about the trends in supply chain. And finally, we're going to have a break, five minutes break. And after that, we are going to share with you the general guidelines for the comprehensive final exam. Just be here to answer your questions as always. So let's start with the debrief of the fresh connection. So first of all, I'm going to share with you the results for the last four rounds. I'm going also to discuss a little bit about the online experience versus the on-campus experience with playing the game and finally the main takeaways of the game. So let's start with the results. Let's go to the next slide. Next one. Okay, so then the first connection. As you know, at this moment, this is a simulation game, so more than 2,000 students registered in the game, but active students, in round one, we have 1,200 active students and in round two, three and four, almost the same number, 1,500 of active students. So can we go to the next slide, please? Thank you. So in terms of the average score, as you know, you started with a minus 3.96 ROI in the company and the main goal was just to improve and help the company to improve this return of investment. So the average score in round one, three and four, was almost the same minus 3.2. However, in round two, we see a little bit worse results in terms of the average of score and also in the medium. So we can see that, I think the reason behind that is you take more risk between round one and round two, which is great because at the end, the main goal behind this game is the learning. What we really want here is that you understand that the decisions in the supply chain are interconnected and understand the trade offs associated with each single decision that you made in the game. So regarding the standard deviation, it's almost about 8% to 9% in each of the rounds. Let's move now to the distribution of the score. So we have here the distribution for the last four rounds. As you can see, we have a long tail on the left side of this chart. We also have results like minus 50, minus 60 ROI. These results are based basically, I think you include the wrong units. You just include points in state of a period for decimal points. These kinds of errors are the main reason for this, very, very minus 60 ROI results. In terms, let's go to the next slide. This is a zoom. What we did here is just to trim the tail. As you can see here, most of our students are in between this minus 4% of return of investment and 5%. So I would say that the online experience went very well and in terms of results, I'm really proud of you guys. You did a great job. It's not easy in this game to improve the ROI of the company and we see here ROI close to the 9.4%, which is a very, very good result. Let's move now to the next slide. So here what we are showing is the different percentiles. So we have that 25% of our students in rounds one and two, they are in between 2% of ROI and 6.5%. So this is very good results and we can also see that in rounds 3 and 4, this result is even better. So 25% of our students are in between 3.5% and almost 9%, which is, as I mentioned before, a great result. Can we go, yes, round one and two and three and four. The main reason here is in rounds three and four, you are allowed to make more decisions and this freedom gives you the opportunity to help more the company and to get these higher results. Can we go to the next one? Perfect. So now let's have a look to the next chart. So in the next chart, one more, yes. So here what we did is just to see the improvement between one round and the second round. So from round one and round two, what's happening is that almost 600 of students improved their ROI. So they started with a minus 4% ROI and they helped the company to go to a positive number to add 3, 3.5%, 4%. But also another almost 600 of students tried to do the same thing, but at the end they didn't achieve this improvement in ROI and the ROI was worse than the first round. As I mentioned before, the important thing is here is the learning. We receive very positive feedback from you guys. I'm very happy to see that even if the ROI is better or is not as good as in the previous round, the most important thing is to understand the trade-off behind. And I think the learning is behind even if you help the company to improve or even in the other case. However, if we go through the evolution between round two and round three, and round three and round four, we can see that the majority of the students got better results when they go further. This is one of the reasons because you have more decisions. You were allowed to make more decisions so the level of difficulty of the game was higher but you also have the experience to play previous round. Also, with this number of decisions, you were allowed to help the company to have a better return of investment. Let's go now to the top players. So we have here Vinicius, Lucas, and Rafael. Congratulations to all of you guys. You got here more than 9% of the return of investment. And the most important thing for me here is how you improved since the beginning. For instance, in the case of Vinicius, he started with a minus 0% in the ROI in round one and in round four he ends with this 9.2%, which is great. Same thing with Lucas. In round one, he got minus 1.4%, and at the end, this 9%. I also show here the top students. In round three, we have Andrea with this 9.4%. It's the highest performance in the game. You were competing Andrea with 1500 students, so this is really great. Yeah, and the other student very close to this 9%. So as you know by now, those students that got the highest 10%, they are between the 10% that score better, you are invited to go to the international competition in the first connection. And this is open to verify and also to audit the student. Any student that played the game, got very good results, can participate in this international competition. If you are interested in more details, just go to the fresh connection website and you will find more details about that. Let's have a look now what this student did playing the game. So what I want to highlight here is that I just choose some of these top players and analyze a little bit what they did in supply chain. So we can see here that this very high performance can be achieved following different strategies. So for instance, for player one, we can see that the focus is mainly in the availability of components. So it's 99.6%, the availability of components with the suppliers. The stock components was 2.3 weeks for this raw material and the stock of final products 2.5. However, we can see that player three follow a different strategy. The stock of finished products was much higher than the strategy that player one and two follow in this sense and the availability of components, however, was higher. So the percentage of availability of components was almost 100% here. So we can see that we can get very good performance at the end following different strategies in the supply chain. Let's go to the purchasing now and see here what our students are also doing here. So again, we have a student player one focus more on the delivery reliability with the suppliers was 86% here. However, player two tried to negotiate a better agreement with the suppliers. In this case, he went through a 96%. These also have implications in other areas of the company. So this has implications in the safety stock that they need to have, not only for raw material also for finished goods. So what they want to highlight here are that there is not a unique approach to get these very good results. You can follow different strategies. The most important thing here is that all of the decisions and the tradeoffs you are taking into consideration in the game should be aligned with your supply chain strategy and again with the strategy of the company. So let's go, here is just to illustrate the top player, what the top player did not only in purchasing, also in operations, supply chain and sales. Just to have a look at the implications and how the decisions in the different areas of the company are interconnected. Here what they did is just to have a look to those learners that on average during the four rounds they did very well. In this case we can see that these students when they started with round one they have a very good ROI and at the end they finish with 7.5%, 8% of this ROI. So congratulations Joaquin. You are one of the most active students in our forums with our email so I'm so happy to see that you did very well also in the game and got very good results. Let's have a look now to the experience, your experience, online experience. I need to say here this is the first time that the fresh connection we are delivering this simulation game through the online platform. I'm really satisfied with the results also very satisfied with the fresh connection and the time of response for any issue we have during the game. Let's have a look now to the differences. We have been playing this game on campus for the last five years. The main difference between one experience and the other is the following thing. The online experience we just have one player. One student was playing the four roles. This is more time consuming in terms of you need to go to each different role and you need to review all of the reports and understand very well each of the roles in the company. However, you also have less number of decisions so when the students are playing here on campus they are playing in teams for four players. So they need to spend more time arguing and discussing with the team players about the strategy they are going to follow. So this is one of the main differences. The second difference is the number of decisions in the online game. We limited a little bit and we didn't offer as much as decisions as we offer in the on-campus experience. Mainly because you are just one player playing the four roles. The second reason is because in online education things need to be more direct and straightforward and we just offer less number of decisions for the online. The other thing that we did differently for some of the on-campus ones we'd run them while the students were at the different centers for the students that were in here at MIT as well as the Zaragoza Center the Malaysia Center and Bogota for Latin America. So in some of these runs we'd have it where you'd have a team of people who've never met before. So that was a different dynamic and so the fresh connection when it's used here and if anyone comes to the blended program you'll probably play the fresh connection again. It's a very different learning because it's all about coordinating. You have the luxury of being your own person and it's a gift-a-prenic and you actually agree with your own strategy. The challenge with the team is to be able to have multiple people and to convince each other of it. So there are very different learnings between the online and the in-residence. Definitely, this is one of the main points here. In the online experience you compete with 1500 students. On campus we have around 120 students playing the game at the same time. And I just show here the distributions based on the four rounds that you play through SC4X and also the distribution for the last three years that our students playing during their experience here on campus. In terms of the average of median we cannot compare the numbers because as I mentioned the game that the student playing on campus is different. The starting point is different. They start from minus 7% of ROI. In case you started with minus 4% of ROI so the median and these values as you can see are different. The game by itself is also different. But in terms of the distribution and where the majority of the students are that is in between this 0% and the 5% is very similar. Okay, let's move now to the takeaways. So the main takeaways for this online experience with the fresh connection. The first thing and the most important thing is that the strategy should be aligned. So different strategies work. Indeed we have a close look to this best player and we observe that they follow different strategies but each decision should be aligned with the supply chain strategy and at the end with the company strategy. So this is one of the main takeaways of this game. Also this alignment needs to happen between the different departments, between the different roles. As a Chris mentioned, I think we observe very good results in the online experience and one of the main reasons is because you need to align with yourself with the strategy that you decide which makes this a little bit easier than the experience when you are playing with other teams, with other peers. Each decision represents a trade-off in the game. Yes, as I mentioned, great results, great results in the online experience even taking into consideration that the number of decisions that you were allowed to make was a limited one. So my conclusion is that you spend more time making the decision, analyzing the report, understanding the trade-offs behind each decision than negotiating with other team members. I also... Yes, let's move to the second one. I went through the test tool that posts in the thread in the discussion following your main takeaways. I just picked this from George. Thank you, George. Another of our very active students. And these are the main takeaways from George which I picked because I think they are very aligned, very, very... very oriented to the game. So the first one is a strategy is key. Supply chain has an important role in company's performance. I fully agree with you, George. We have four roles during the first connection, but the supply chain is the role that has a huge impact in the final result and the performance of the company. They are always trade-offs when decision is made, as we mentioned before, company decisions versus department decisions. This is another of the main takeaway of this game. And finally, you may hear a very good point is the importance to integrate suppliers and customers. So those students that when they were making the decision about the safety stuff they need in the inbound or outbound warehousing, they were thinking about the agreements with their suppliers and the agreement with their customer, they got at the end a better result. So this is all from my side. Thank you so much. I hope that you enjoyed the game. Thank you for all of the positive feedback received about the fresh connection. And definitely I think we are going to use for the next round of the SC4X because I think it was very, very useful and helpful for our students. Anything you want to add? Any feedback on how you see we can best use the fresh connection going forward, we debated a lot whether to use it or not. And then also whether to open it up to all students or just verify. Also we had questions whether we should pair you up in teams or not. So we opted for everyone to do it individually. And so we would like to see maybe we have teams because I think we're missing a piece of it by you guys not having to convince each other and work with each other to come up with a consensus strategy. But we don't know quite how to do that across such a large group of people. But any feedback you guys have, we'd appreciate that. Excellent. Yes, definitely. SC4X, SC4X directly to me and we will review that. Okay, we received some questions. What's the media mode for the fresh connection? Yes, I have this data. For round four, the median was minus 0.2%. And the average score was minus 3.1% of ROI. And the standard deviation of the distribution was 9%. Okay, what else? Jonathan, oh my. What's the, no, sorry. Jonathan is asking about the cutoff for the 10%. I do not have this number on the top of my head, but I would say Jonathan, that the best scores are between 5% and 9.4%. But I really I will go through this number and share it with you. What else? Should we pay to register in the First Connection Global Professional Challenge? This is something that you need to go through the First Connection website. This is out of our scope. This is something that the First Connection is offering. So, yeah, I would say let's go to the First Connection website and see all the details there. Yep. Okay, so let's move now to the wrap up. SC4X was a different kind of course. So if you guys have been with us the whole time, what you saw for SC 0X, 1X, and 2X were much more quantitative. 2X started becoming more qualitative and then 3 and 4 became much less quantitative and it was more of the practical concerns. So what 4X tried to do was to show you how companies practically solved these problems because when we taught you these methods, modes, and different methodologies in 0X, 1X, and 2X, we used spreadsheets, we used toy sample data. The methodologies don't change. What changes is the size of the problem and so we introduced you to databases and structured information and also how to use SQL, structure query language to understand how you can mine massive amounts of data. We also wanted to make sure we weaned you off of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are great for certain simple analysis. They're great, great tools. They are not meant for large scale analysis and too many companies use spreadsheets in lieu of the systems and so we wanted to make sure you at least had, we're armed with the capability of using structured relational databases. Then we went in and said, okay, now that you've got this massive amounts of data what can you do with it? And that's why we introduced just a little bit machine learning because more and more of you will be asked to do big data analysis. It's a big buzz word right now but all that it means is we've got a ton of data, can we do something with it and so we introduced just a little bit and we're going to try and see should I add more in. And the reason why we added this in FC4X and not in zero is because I think it's helpful to have all the context before you start doing it. And so we'll see but I'm curious what you guys think about whether we should expand that part or not. Then we went into software because again when in real life you're not going to do this in a spreadsheet because the data is too big and also you have multiple players and so I talked through how ERPs came about and how the event actually came from supply chain tools because initially you had a supply chain tool that tried to do coordination between suppliers, MRP systems and the manufacturer and that kind of grew into a larger ERP or the enterprise resource planning system and then I wanted to spend a lot of time on when you acquire or implement or procure the software, the decisions you make and the two big ones are do I do my ERP extension, do I stay within this large one, do I do a best of breed or do I do something in the middle, one of those best of breed ecosystems or platforms that I talked about. Then the other dimension is do I make it, do I buy it or do I rent it and the whole renting of enterprise-wide software that area has grown in the last four years. So if you talk to anyone from SAP, Oracle, JDA, Manhattan 80 to 90% of all their implementations are cloud-based and so I tried to explain the differences of what cloud is because it's a big buzzword right now but essentially it means many different things. Do I have a software as a service? Do I have it as a platform as a service where I own a little bit more or do I treat it as an infrastructure as a service? So I tried to color that out because these are the decisions you're going to have to make in the acquisition and every one of you is going to be involved to some degree of acquiring and procuring and selecting software and we finished up with the implementation of software and that's a nightmare in itself and I went through the Hershey's case study and interestingly earlier this week we had a large conference here and you got some Hershey, there are partners of ours, we're here and I was talking to them about it and the guy who I was talking to, they're in the middle of another SAP implementation, they're going to moving to the cloud-based system that if you watched the interview that he had talked about and so I asked how it was going and he'd been at Hershey's for about 17, 16 years so he came in right after they had that failed SAP implementation and he said it's night and day but he came in right as they were just burrowing out of that but it's a great story and if you talk to any other company who's implemented SAP or Oracle, any of these large systems they'll have similar stories so the reason why we covered that was just so you know the pitfalls and the terminology so you just understand what's actually done in practice but the big thing from SC4X is to show you in two dimensions why you can't just use spreadsheets and why you need to use large enterprise-wide systems because you have multiple players involved and you need to have structured relational databases because the data is massive and if it's not structured it's going to cause problems so that's what we try to accomplish with SC4X and then the last thing we did just for fun I introduced new technologies and let's make sure that is this on camera and so I asked you guys to to come in and to look for different technologies and I just did four and these are just ones that I wanted to look at economists, trucks drones, mobile computing and 3D or additive manufacturing and so what I asked you to do a dimension of whether you thought it would be timing-wise now or in the next five years or after five years and also I asked for what the impact would be, large or small and so what I did here on and everyone voted and you could be one of four quadrants or you could say there's no impact none of these really had too many people saying there's no impact ever and what's interesting is autonomous trucks was the most consistent and mobile computing they both be large and most people thought that mobile is here, it's already happened it's going to happen in the next five years it's going to be a tremendous impact, a lot of omnichannel stuff that Ava works on as well in her research what's interesting is the drones were equally divided amongst all four quadrants so that's why I put them in the middle because it depends how you feel about it no one really knows, I'm in the opinion I think I put it in the soon small, I don't think it's going to have much, it'll have very niche but we'll say I could be wrong the regulation is an issue with drones and this is, we asked for drone delivery because other things if you watch TV shows it's had a huge impact because of the filming or if you look at farming it's had a big impact, I was talking to an oil producer and they used it tremendously to be able to look at property that's very spread out, the other one was 3D printing, everyone thought it was going to be a big impact but it was evenly split between soon and later and that's an interesting one, I think I put it as sooner because it took a while to get over that hype curve but if you look at the manufacturers like General Electric as a prime example they're integrating in, it's one thing to watch for any of these new technologies to start seeing acquisitions of startups to see which companies are acquiring these little ones and because that gives you an indicator of what's going to happen just like I pointed out for autonomous trucks that Intel have made some big purchases to get into the autonomous truck because they see chips being in there it gives you a sense of what these large players are looking for and how they might move so it's another way to look at where the trends might be and so just yesterday here at MIT we had a conference two days ago, what's today? Today's Thursday right, so Tuesday, we had someone come in and talk about big data analytics, we had someone talk about 3D printing, Professor John Hart did a great job talking about that we had people talk about blockchain technology and that's one that we should probably talk about as well, it's more of a distributed database and how this can change some of the interactions between training partners, we had someone talk about sensors, smart sensors and so we'll talk about materials if you think of how materials can be changed to different properties that could have huge impacts on a lot of manufacturing and downstream supply chain so this type of stuff, what I wanted you to get is to flex the muscles to think about okay, if a new technology or new trend comes in line what will that do to my business, will that have a big impact, a little impact, how will it impact and these are just kind of fun examples to get you thinking along those lines I could have picked a million other things I could have picked Brexit or the Trump's election here or the politics that are happening in France there's a lot of other things you can put in that are not just technical but it's a way of looking at your supply chain and trying to assess what the impact will be so that's what I tried to do in FC4x so hopefully you guys enjoyed it, it was fun putting it together, any feedback you have please give it to us because first runs are always the toughest we don't know what to expand, what to shrink it's usually the second or third run where we're able to fix things and improve it so any suggestions you have we're all ears to that Yes, we are asking now for feedback in the next newsletter you will receive a link to post your feedback so please do that the feedback always helps us to improve our courses this is a specifically one to ask you for feedback about the interviews see the interviews you find helpful for the course and also about the mini-case as you know we introduce the mini-case not only as a way to learn but also as a way to assess so we really want to know your feedback about the mini-case and for future runs we are also thinking about to use the mini-case not only for assessment also to discuss a little bit more with Hangout Events or any other way that we can also interact with you in the discussion of the case studies okay so with that I want to say best of best in the final exam this is the final yesterday you have one week to take the exam six hours, it's a time exam six hours, best of luck on that so it's a timed exam it's not proctored, right? it's a standard timed exam all the proctoring stuff was done as test before the only proctor you'll see going forward is the CFX and we'll talk about that and then after the break we are going to talk about the next step that is the comprehensive final exam so yeah we are also very excited to see if you are almost about to close the finish line of the micromaster credential yep so this is all from my side anything else please nope, nope okay so in five minutes we are going to come back discuss a little bit more about the comprehensive final exam but you can go to the breakout rooms and talk about anything if you want to debate over the technologies or start asking questions or formulating questions about the CFX or anything else we are going to have 10-15 minutes to answer your questions so we'll see you in about five minutes thank you