 Alright everyone welcome back. Hopefully you were able to chat with your peers and discuss some interesting things. Please use the chat if you have any questions you want to ask Amat or myself or Arthur or Sergio they're here behind the camera as well and they can answer questions. But there are three that I want to address that came in. First one ask one about the different certifications. As you know there are different supply chain certifications out there. There's Apex, CFCP, FC Pro, IFM which is the supply management one. And they all are slightly different. And then the MicroMasters I don't think it really competes with those because those are more I don't say lower level but they cover a broader set of things but they don't go quite as deep. And so for example the amount of math we do is a little deeper here and why? Because we think it's important for you to understand how the software works. Not just you know how to just operate it. And so I would say that Apex especially is much broader and FC Pro is much broader because they cover some end-to-end but they don't go as deep. So if I had to classify them that way it really depends where you want to go and how you want to use it. If you want to get in manufacturing I think Apex is more recognized than CFCP or FC Pro. If you want to be in procurement that's ISM is the one that matters for you that's the Institute of Supply Management or procurement or sourcing. If you're going to be in a pure mini-distribution then the CSCMP ones are probably a little more attuned to that. So they all have slightly different flavors but I think the big difference between them and what we do is one they're a little more qualitative and we're a little more quantitative. We go a little deeper and they go a little broader. But that's I mean they're all good. We talk with the guys at CSCMP, we talk with the guys at Apex all the time and you know as things go on Apex has been acquiring more and more of these societies and groups so they're getting a pretty a lot bigger but CSCMP is still the biggest one out there. So that's sort of for the certifications different credentials. Someone else asked Baskar asked about can we tell about real-world applications like SAP? We do that in SC4X. So let me talk two different things. One is the software systems that are used and the other is the applications of the methods that are used. So we'll talk about the methods that are used in SC0X, 1X and 2X. So when we talk about forecasting and we talk about using exponential smoothing or anything like that that's the actual method that's used by any forecasting system whether it's in SAP, Oracle, Manhattan, JDA, you name the software provider they're using the same fundamental models. So we're going to teach you the fundamental models. In SC4X we talk about how to pick between the different software systems whether it be go with a cloud-based or a host-based, a best-of-breed, the ERP extension, all those kind of practical things. But what we like to do first is teach you the basics. What is it doing? What is the heart of what's being done? Then we'll talk about the how it's done in practice. So that's how we've divided it up, Askar. Someone else asked about the date for the verification deadline. Remember I said to get verified. That's how you get credentialized and that's how you get access to the supplemental materials. The deadline to do that is the 19th of April at 1500 UTC. You've got to be verified by then if you want to be verified for the course. We need to have you verified before the midterm and that's what we're doing it for. So got to do it by the 19th so that's what next Wednesday at 1500 UTC, not your local time UTC. So check the website to see what time that is in your area. Great, so we've got the question of the date. So it's asking that I'm new in the supply chain management. Okay, welcome. How can I make money out of this in the real world? In the real world as opposed to making money out of Bitcoin in the unreal world. So yeah, it's a huge profession. I mean the word supply chain wasn't coined until the mid 80s and so now it's one of the fastest growing segments within the industry and so supply chain covers everything from procurement, sourcing down to customer demand, distribution, inventory management and some areas it includes some of the manufacturing, a lot of the planning. So to make money off it, get a job with the company and in any of their supply chain functions. Now many companies don't have a supply chain function. They might have a transportation group, an inventory group, a warehousing group, a planning group and it kind of falls under operations. Other companies have a chief logistics officer that might have warehousing and transportation but procurement is done separately. So every company is a little bit different but they all procure, make, deliver, plan. They all do those functions but they're in different areas. So if you want to make money, I suggest you start looking at companies and start applying for positions within the supply chain. The other side of things there are consultancies, there's software companies that develop tools to actually help companies use these different models and methods. So that's another avenue of approach. So there's a lot of areas to find jobs and employment for this. We've had many students from the MIT program start their own companies. So two guys who graduated in 2003, Jeff Silver and Bill Dragart along with some others graduates went and founded a company called the Coyote Logistics when they graduated. It was bought by UPS for 1.5 or 1.8 billion dollars about a year, year and a half ago. So there's a lot of opportunities here. Other graduates have started other companies in either software, brokerage. There's a ton of different ones out there so there's a lot of opportunities to make money in the field. The name Bitcoin and Andrew is asking that do you think it's going to be using supply chain? That's a good question. We actually just had a conference here last week where we had someone from the Sloan School explain Bitcoin and talk about it. There's a pretty well-documented case study going on with IBM, Maersk and Walmart where Maersk is a large ocean shipper. IBM is Watson, they are artificial intelligence and Walmart's a big shipper and they're trying to use it to replace the bill laden for traceability all the way in to point of origin, point of destination. Essentially blockchain is a shared ledger system that different technology allows people to authenticate itself and it's widespread, easy to access and it's hard to conduct fraud. That's the whole idea of it. I don't truly understand some of the math behind it but that's how it's being used. We'll see. I don't know it's still being figured out. People are using it for financial payments. You see banks using it more. I know people are trying it for certain things but it's hard. It's kind of like any technology that you see get introduced. There's usually a lot of hype because no one knows what to do with it and they're throwing spaghetti at the wall seeing what sticks. After a certain point of time certain applications stick and then they get used and other ones they don't work and so they fall away. Same thing happened for RFID, radio frequency identification. Back in the early 2000s RFID was going to be on everything. We'd all have RFID tags. Everything would be tagged. It didn't happen but it made sense for certain things and so it's found it's niche in certain high-value things or certain bulky things that are hard to move but it's not for everything. We're seeing the same thing and in every kind of new introduction that comes in we see this wave of a hype and then we see where the actual use starts happening. I think you'll see it in autonomous vehicles. Blockchain will probably fall in the same way. In SC4X this is what we talked about in the very last lesson. We actually I talked about new technologies coming on and saying okay what do you guys think we have a discussion about where we see the different technologies fall. This year we talked about autonomous vehicles, drones because everyone wants to use drones. What else was it? Mobile computing and there was a fourth one. I can't think of right now but I think it'll have a role. I don't know how big it is to be honest. Long answer to a short question. I have a question about the cross-definition. Are there six course recognized fully recognized by MIT? I don't know what that means. Fully recognized. So the way that the MicroMasters credential if you earn the MicroMasters credential all five courses and the CFX the comprehensive final exam and you apply to the supply chain management program and you get in then we will grant you 42 credits essentially one semester of work. So yes they fully invest that. Now there's other MicroMasters programs coming online. Economics department is starting one and they'll have the same thing. You can earn the credential by itself and that's awesome just like ours. If you want to use that at MIT then you can apply that and if you get in you get a half semester of credit. We'll have other ones coming online from other departments. We just happen to be the first one ever and so a lot of company a lot of the programs are learning from what we do but yes it is fully recognized for the SEM program. Do you have any other question? Can you mention how we are treating CTL? Yeah so if you go to our website for CTL Center for Transportation and Logistics we've been around for over 40 years and starting about 14 years ago we started developing international centers. So the first one we opened was in Zaragoza Spain the ZLC Zaragoza Logistics Center and they are a mirror of what we do here. They have a graduate program they do research and they work with companies. The three things we do here at CTL in 2008 we started the Center for Latin America Logistics Innovation in Bogota Columbia doing the same thing. In 2011 we started one in Malaysia for Southeast Asia. It's actually in Salaam just outside of Kuala Lumpur, Misi, the Malaysian Institute for Supplementary Innovation and last year we opened two centers one in Mingbo China and one in Luxembourg and so we have centers in so South America, North America here, Europe, Southeast Asia and Asia in China and so each of these centers is an autonomous center but we all work together as a network so every January all the students from all the centers come here to MIT for three weeks. So anyone who comes in in the blended program that's when you'll be starting. So in January 2018 we'll have the students from all six of the centers MIT, Luxembourg, Zaragoza, Malaysia, China and Bogota all together along with the blended students and so we'll have about 200 and a little over 200 students all together probably have over 100 countries recommend and represented so the scale network is a bunch of autonomous centers but we work together as a network for both the education side and the research. So it's by coming here you're getting tapping into a much larger network which is really interesting because your initial network is you know the students you work with but now it's at larger global reach. Before we end I want to ask Arthur come and say hello. Arthur is the great guy. Hi guys I'm Arthur Grau I'm a communications person for the MicroMasters here at the supply chain and you will probably be hearing from me either by email or through the portal on here but most of the time I'm behind the camera and these guys when they look in that direction they're probably looking at me so welcome to the courses and I hope to see you someday on campus. Excellent. Thanks Arthur. Thanks Arthur. Perfect. So any other questions? Anyone? One more? Okay. When should they... So there's two things. So I think there's a so getting the credential in coming to the supply chain management blended program are two separate things. So the credential itself requires the capstone or the excuse me comprehensive final exam. The first one will be run in May this year. The next one will probably happen in late January early February next year. It'll be within a month or two after we run SC4X and so what we want to get to is a regular schedule of a spring fall. So we'll run the CFX but comprehensive final exam twice a year probably in the spring and the fall each year. This year since our first time through we're a little later than we'd like to be but it's the fastest we could do it to make sure the SC4X was finished first. So if you do all the courses you can technically do them in 18 months. Everything from start to finish. We set them up so zero finishes one starts and then two and three then four and then the final. So hopefully that's that's how we designed it and how you can come in but that that's how we set up. Now the blended program if you get the MicroMasters there's nothing stopping you from applying for the full 10 month program if you want. So we're getting more students coming in last year and this coming year who've taken a number of the different courses and that's fine. We work with you individually on that. There's nothing that says if you get the MicroMasters you can't come back to MIT for a full year. You can probably take more electives so that's something you can certainly consider. Yeah okay my last word is if you want to get a certificate and using the supplemental materials in the next hangout events and then you have to get verified. We should get verified and the deadline is a period 19. So yeah all right last word. No I'd go back to the discussion that you can go to your breakout rooms if you want and you can talk we'll keep that open for another hour is that right Arthur? Yeah okay so you can go and talk to yourselves then and please enjoy the course hope you become verified and I hope I get to see you sometime. All right take care.