In recent years, online education has come to the forefront as an alternative to traditional education programs. Its increasing prominence reflects its adaptability, flexibility, affordability, and far-reaching scale. As the global workforce stands to undergo significant changes in the next 5-10 years due to digitalization, advancements in AI, and automation, employers are increasingly valuing skills over degrees. For workers, this requires a mindset of continuous learning.
In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Eva Ponce, Director of Online Education at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, and Dr. Inma Borrella, Academic Lead for the MITx MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management. Eva and Inma discuss the role of online education in upskilling the workforce and the impact of the MITx MicroMasters Program, the first of its kind.
Transcript
- Welcome to another episode of Supply Chain Frontiers, the MITCTL podcast where we explore the trends, technologies, and innovations shaping the future of supply chain management. I'm your host, Benjy Kantor, and today we're diving into a topic that's become central to the evolution of our field, the future of work, and the role of online education in up-skilling and re-skilling the supply chain workforce. Joining me today are two of MITCL's leading experts in online education. Dr. Eva Ponce, director of online education, and the MITX MicroMasters program in supply chain management and Dr. Inma Borrella academic lead of that same program, the MITX MicroMasters program in Supply Chain Management. Eva and Inma have been instrumental in shaping online learning offerings at MITCTL, which have reached over a million registrants globally. And today we'll explore how their work and online education in general is empowering individuals and organizations to meet the demands of an evolving workforce. With that, I'm really excited for the opportunity to learn more about the opportunities online learning creates for up-skilling and re-skilling, we'll be talking about that today along with the challenges organizations face in adopting these tools and what the future holds for workforce education and supply chain management. Let's get started with our guests, Eva Ponce and Inma Borrella, just to set the stage. Thank you so much for being here. Eva, can you walk us through the various online offerings that are currently being offered through MITCTL?
- Yes, so we started in 2014 offering the first massive open online course in supply chain fundamentals. Then in 2016 we offered the MicroMasters program supply chain math. The MicroMaster includes five massive open online courses that goes from supply chain analytics to supply chain fundamental, supply chain design, supply chain dynamics and supply chain technologies and systems. After completing the five massive open online courses, learners need to take a comprehensive and final exam just to earn the MicroMaster credential. So we started with that in 2016, having almost 10 years of MicroMaster credential in the world. We are also offering a specialized massive open online courses. We have courses in sustainability, humanitarian logistic more recently in advanced network design. And we see these specialized MOOCs as electives, as those kind of courses that after completing the MicroMaster program learners can take or as a courses that anyone from anywhere want to learn about sustainability and just pick that MOOC in order to learn about that topic. So this is one of the things we are offering currently, we have been offering online customized courses for companies and we are growing in this area. We have companies like Walmart, like BMS, CH Robinson, companies from different industries, different sectors that are using custom online courses to upskill and re-skill their workforce of the future. Just as a testimony of the impact that we've had around the world, you mentioned Benjy, that MicroMasters program got more than 1.2 million enrollments, but we pursue more than 70,000 certificates. There is individual core certificates. We have about 5,500 credential holders that people that completed the whole journey and got our credential and we run more than 100 courses. So it's been really like a very intense, that's it, just a hundred. But it's amazing. So it's really fulfilling to see the impact that this program has had in in during this year. So yeah, fantastic. We're very energized to keep going.
- Eva, perhaps you can start just sort of describing the landscape of online education and supply chain management and what kind of trends you've seen emerge in recent years.
- The landscape of online education in supply chain management has transformed significantly in recent years. It's no longer just an option for learning, but has also become a critical enabler for companies and organizations to re-skill and up upscale the workforce of the future in supply chain management. If we want to look a little bit to the history and over the past decade, online education has grown exponentially. The emergence of digital platforms like edX and Coursera in 2012 definitely brings opportunity to well-known universities like MIT and Harvard and many others to just create courses to be specifically delivered through this online mean. And this platform has helped definitely us in the education landscape to democratize knowledge, has helped to provide these online courses and open this education to anyone from anywhere. The online education is really flexible, it's affordable, it's convenient, allowed to provide grad level education. So I think these digital platforms brought a key milestone in online education. What we have observed recently, I would say specifically more after the pandemic, is how companies are also identifying this online education and this platform as a way to upscale the workforce of the future. And I want to highlight the pandemic for two reasons because supply chain management as a field has also changed a lot. The introduction of new technologies, the introduction of AI tools are definitely bringing the need of upscale the workforce of supply chain management professionals. So this need that the pandemic highlighted because brought the importance of supply chain management and supply chain management, mainly what we are doing is trying to connect the origin with and bring the products to the customer. During the pandemic we were able to observe many issues related to that endeavor. We are observing more and more companies coming to us just to use online education for that endeavor.
- Well, and no one would ever say thank goodness for the pandemic, right? But I agree with you. It highlighted the opportunity to what you just said, democratize education. And I think that the key that you mentioned, I wanted to ask about this in terms of challenges of growing that program in that community is as things are more accessible to more people and supply chain is top of mind for people like our director of the center, Yossi Shef, he said, "Oh my wife finally understands what I do for a living after 50 years, right?" Like, 'cause it's in the zeitgeist now. But the quality of the program I think is the key piece because there was probably concerns about when this program was lifting off that it would have that sort of same quality that you're getting from an education from higher universities and higher ed in general and like did you see that? Was there a pushback? Is there still pushback about the difference of level of quality between online and in person?
- I think in terms of the quality of content, there is no different. I think the important thing here is the type of content. What we have learned through the years is that there is certain contents that are definitely better to be taught online and there are still other, for example, soft skills. Soft skills like negotiation, communication, I believe that is better to teach in person. However, there are other skills we can connect with some of the skills that are really required now like analytical skills, supply chain analytics, these type of skills or inventory management models, demand forecasting techniques. These are topics content that definitely we can deliver in a very effective and efficient way through the online platforms. These online platforms allow learners to learn at their self pace whenever they have the time to do that and are very effective from the learning perspective because also provide immediate feedback. And this allow what we call reinforcing learning. And this reinforcing learning is really critical and effective. So when you are learning through a short video, let's say that concept, you have the opportunity to immediately apply to a real world problem. This is really effective. And one of the key things of problems like MicroMaster for example, is this combination of high quality content, graduate level content. And what we are teaching through these courses is truly exactly the same. What we are teaching here on campus at MIT, the combination of these short videos with these specific problems, exercises that represent real problems and the opportunity to receive this immediate feedback I think is really effective and powerful in this online means. So I think the discussion is more what are these content that should be delivered online or is more effective to deliver online and what are these content or what aspects do we want to build on this online knowledge and then have further discussion, deep discussions on campus. And this is something we have been learning over the years and now I think we have a better understanding about these contents that work better in one format versus the other format. And I personally truly believe that the combination of both formats is what really brings the best of both worlds.
- For learners who are around the globe and who are in the workforce, they're working and they might not be able to have this period of time where they're applying for a program and attending a program and going in person. And like what you're saying, that immediate sort of access I could imagine make a huge difference for someone like, I'm gonna go home tonight at five, 6:00 PM and I can access that content then instead of having to be at a place and missing out on my job forever long. And actually that sort of brings me to a point where I wanted to bring in Inma and your thoughts about how the workforce in supply chain has changed over the last 5, 10, 20 years and what role you see online education for that. We touched a little bit on that but I think if you have some additional stuff to add on that.
- Sure, yeah, thank you for the question Benjy. So I think there are many new trends in the supply chain management field that require for people to really upskill themselves. But taking a step back, we also need to understand that many people working in supply chain management didn't have a formal education in this field. We have people coming from engineering, from economics, but also from biology, from literature. It's a field that attracts many different profiles and many people falling it by chance at some point in their career.
- Everybody's sort of accidentally in supply chain.
- Exactly and then you know, it really sparks passion in people and people really like love it because it's a combination of analytics or the more like hard skills or math kind of profiles with also these business communications, negotiations, stakeholder management kind of skills. So people really, really like and feel comfortable in this field because it's challenging in many ways, it's personal but it's also technical, right? So it's about relationships but also about knowing well your math skills. So I think this lack of formal background sometimes also like can hinder progression in this field. So many people after being in it for a few years or starting on it, they realize they need to have a better skillset, more tools in order to address the problems that they face in the daily jobs. And that's what we've heard from many learners in the MicroMasters program that they actually like wanted to upskill themselves. They were looking for something that could help them with their daily job, maybe to solve an inventory management problem or to develop a better strategy for a global supply chain. And they found our courses online and our courses are very learn and apply. That's our approach. Mens et Manus like the MIT motto. And we find that these courses, online courses, ours and others are filling this gap of people without a formal background that want to learn these basic models that can help them solve supply chain management problems. So that's on one hand the more more basic like filling this gap of knowledge that many people new to the field they then ever like formally learn. And then there's the new trends, whatever was mentioning about new technologies AI like what everybody's talking about right now. And of course, that's a concern for professionals and also for companies who want to upskill their workforce and make sure they're up to date. So actually, there's many like research being done out there. So the World Economic Forum for example is always publishing this research about the work of the future and they identify that two of the three top skills are analytical thinking and technological literacy. So these are like the top skills being sought after by companies. They want that in their workforce. And I think these are two skills that are really a very good fit for online education as Eva was mentioning earlier, because they change very rapidly. So online education usually is more dynamic, it's continuously updated. We want to stay on top of new trends and the cost of updating online education is relatively lower, right? You don't need to like change a whole program in person, on campus or stuff like that. You can really like introduce small changes, updates continuously to be on top of it. And also because these are hard, straightforward topics, it's not negotiation or communication skills that are harder to teach online. So they really are a really good fit for this online environment.
- And with a finite amount of time or content that can be put into the courses. And this would be applicable to in-person courses too, but how do you decide what to add or what to drop when things change? Either one of you, yeah, we had Eva and Inma look at each other and say which one of us should take this.
- To film the videos take a lot of effort. So I like to see that dynamic part that you are bringing. But definitely to update practice problems or exercises or life event is much easier. There is a lot of effort to provide high quality videos. The content is really important to review. What we are doing is, for example, there are certain contents like EOQ models, inventory models, this topic does not change from one year to another. So these type of videos, once you have the quality that you need and you provide that, can be there for years. We have other courses that are more close to new technologies and new trends that we know that after two years at least we need to review and we need to update. What we are trying to do now is the effort of separate more kind of the fundamental part of each technique of each technology and trying to bring the foundations on one side and separate for example applications of these technologies. And sometimes the fundamental part does not change so quickly. However, the applications are continuously evolving. So we are trying just to update the application part versus the fundamental part. So we are trying to, but truly it's a challenge. We are revisiting content every year, the entire team revisit the content, we identify those topics that we need to change and we need to update and there are new topics that we need to incorporate. And one of our courses is called technology and systems and that's the one that is always more of a headache, let's say for us because we need to constantly think about how are we updating this? This is getting a little bit old now and of course now people are asking about AI.
- Well yeah, I was gonna bring that same thing up. I mean we don't have to rehash AI conversations that I've got to imagine that's part of all your conversations that fit into anything, whether it's composing something, a project to warehousing and transportation and things like that.
- Yeah, no, now AI touches on on everything and many people really want us to start teaching like how to use AI in order to like improve supply chain management practices. I think that's a double-edged short as well because we believe it's very important for people to understand the fundamentals of supply chain management. If you don't have the basics, if you don't have the foundations, you won't be able to critically assess if the outcome of GNAI tool is actually gonna be like good or bad. So for us it's very important to start with foundations and then keep progressing from there. And that's how we develop the program actually. And we designed it, it goes from analytics fundamentals to then like broadening the view to supply chain design and then strategy and dynamics, more complexity. And then we end up with the technology and systems that we were mentioning.
- Well as you're now in your 10th year now of the program, I know it was the first program in supply chain management was the first MicroMasters at MIT. Just like the supply chain masters program was the first supply chain masters program in the world almost 30 years ago. And that there's been now over a million enrollments and I know Eva, you'll be the first to tell me 1.2 million. Yeah.
- Yes, exactly.
- So yeah, close to 1.2 million, what is it that's continuing to keep this unique? And when we talked about updating the content, but why do you think it's been so successful and what will keep it that way for you in the future?
- Yeah, different aspect, but let's try to take a step back because truly the MicroMaster supply chain management was the very first of its kind. When the MicroMaster started, nobody knew what it was, right? So it really was the the first office kind and this make the program very innovative since the very beginning, we were pioneering that. Regarding the keys of success, I would say the quality and relevance of the content is one of the key of success. So through this program we are delivering content that is equivalent to the content that we are teaching here on campus. The program was designed since the very beginning to be delivered through the online format. So one hour of lecture, I said that the content is the same content as we are teaching at MIT. However, the way we are delivering is completely different. One hour of lecture at MIT, we divided in short chunks of videos of seven minutes and we spread these videos with quick questions and practice problems. So we trying to get the best of these online platforms to provide learners with some concept, then we design the courses with the principle of learn and apply. So you learn a concept, you apply through a real world problem. Another key of the program is these real world problems. All of the problems are inspired in real world scenarios and this is also part of the, Inma mentioned before DNA of MIT, this hands-on approach. One of the feedback that our learners are bringing to us is that they can apply immediately what they learn in their day-to-day role. And I think all of these things are contributing to our learners. 80% of them are supply chain management professionals or professionals from other fields that, as you mentioned before, Benjy, they are working, they are tired and at the end of the day they are watching the videos and you cannot imagine the great determination and the enthusiast that these learners show to us and they are engaged through the content and the digital platforms I think help through that engagement combining different formats, different short pieces just to keep them engaged.
- As someone myself who has this extremely busy schedule and then goes home and has two kids they have to put to bed and they go to bed and afterwards maybe I'll get to eat dinner with my wife. It's amazing to me that there's this many people who are so dedicated to like, oh, I know that I want to start to learn this or to take the next step there to at 9, 10, 11PM really start taking these courses and then get up the next day and go to work. We've talked a little bit about some of the stories that each of these learners have. Do you have a favorite one from one of the learners?
- I have many, many stories. I can be here for hours.
- One of 1.2 million.
- I want to share one of our learners, he was taking the comprehensive and final exam at the end of the program and after completing that, he submitted his exam and two hours or three hours after that, he shared with us the picture of his triplets. He was in the hospital completing the final exam and some hours after that, the triplets born he was sharing with us. And this means a lot to us. This truly brought to us the grit, the determination, the commitment that the learners are putting in this program. More generally, truly what really inspire me is when our learners come to me and they say, "Hey Eva, thanks to this program my life change, this has been truly a life changer." Some of them because they move from one field to supply chain management field and they land in this amazing field that they love it. Some of them because thanks to this program they are getting a promotion or they are advancing their professional career in many ways or they are advancing their academic career coming to MIT or to any other pathway university. So this is truly what inspired us to continue with this program and it's really, really amazing to see the students coming to you sharing these stories about how this changed their lives.
- I don't wanna let that story go by without also saying there's also this dedication and support from the family. I mean this gentleman's partner who is having the triplets had a lot of patience with him as well too so that he could finish the program while she's in labor ostensibly. So do you have a favorite story from one of learners?
- Yes, so many stories always, so inspiring too, when we meet our learners. But one story that stands out is from one lady who started the MicroMasters supply chain analytics, which is a very mathematical course. We teach probability, hypothesis testing, optimization models. So she came from a literature background so she hasn't seen any math since high school. And so, she landed in the course and she was freaking out. She didn't think she could do it but she was taking like one less after another dedicating some hours to the practice programs and finally she got a passing grade. So she was so excited that she decided to become a community teaching assistant and she started collaborating with us because she just wanted to give back and help others who have been struggling as much as she did. Then she completed the whole credential, she applied to the blended program and she completed the master degree with us and she's still a community teaching assistant for us in supply chain analytics. So this is just to show how empowered people can feel after getting something they never thought they could and even like coming to MIT and completing a master's degree and she's still giving back to the community. So I think that's very inspiring.
- You're listening to MITCTL Supply Chain Frontiers. This episode is brought to you by the MITSCM advancing women through education or AWE fellowship. Since 2018, awesome, in the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics have partnered to provide tuition assistance for women entering the MIT supply chain management master's program. This fellowship aims to help women advance their careers through education and professional growth. Awesome leaders are encouraged to recommend women in their organization or networks to apply. All applicants to the MITSCM program are automatically considered for this fellowship. To read more about the fellowships and other funding and scholarship opportunities, visit ctl.mit.edu/awesome. And back to the episode.
- So the litany program is actually what makes our MicroMasters so unique. That's why it was so special. That's why it's so pioneering because it was the first of its kind and MicroMasters mean that it's a pathway for credit at universities and in this specific case at MIT, it's also accepted as a pathway for credit as many other universities around the world. But this brings a lot of value. Of course, it was a requirement for us to like have this really high quality content in the program. But for MIT to be recognizing this as equivalent as six months of in-person coursework at MIT is huge. So it's giving a sign out to the world that this program is really good. And this relates to what you were saying earlier, this misconception that online is not as good as in person. I think that still exists out there and programs like ours kind of debunk this idea or at least we try to and MIT is giving us this. Guarantee or saying like, this is as good as being here. So that's first and it is an accelerated pathway to a master's degree at MIT, which has huge implications for many people. Usually if you want a master's from MIT, you need to be here for around one year and pay quite a significant amount of money. So this is a pathway in which you can complete after having the credentialing, the micro master's credential of course, you can apply to get a master's degree in just five months and at a fraction of the price of the traditional master's degree. This is amazing because it opens the door to unconventional learners, people who may never consider coming to MIT for a full year because of the cost or because of the time because we were discussing many people taking online courses are very busy. They have a job, they are in another part of the world very far away from the US in many occasions. They have a family, maybe little kids, so many responsibilities that prevent them from taking a full year off.
- Well I can imagine that some companies also would be more welcoming to this idea of letting their employees go take five months or supporting them in that as opposed to a full year because then the additional benefits they come back with the experience, right? 100% bring back into the company, yeah?
- 100% and we've seen that with some of our partners, so actually do you want to talk about that Eva?
- Sure, definitely.
- Yeah, what other the reasons do companies care about the program?
- Yeah, no, but we have exactly companies that are doing that. They are sending their employees first to the MicroMaster program to the five massive open online courses, then the final exam. And after completing that, they are selecting the top performers and these top performers have the opportunity to apply for the blended program and complete five months on campus. This is definitely helping companies to attract talent, is helping companies with retention. To the professionals who are going through that path, definitely they are, after completing the entire journey with us, typically they are getting a promotion as part of their journey and career development. So one of the huge benefit is not only the knowledge that they associates are gaining through that education is also how this is reverting in the company in terms of retention. How these learners are also employees are applying what they learn their day-to-day jobs in order to improve some part of the processes or some part of the supply chain. So companies are reporting huge benefits of investing in their talent in that way.
- Well and if you're an HR manager for say a freight company or a online retailer or anything in this logistics supply chain space and someone comes to you with a certificate from Micro, do you care, like what kind of additional value does that? Are people paying attention to that kind of thing when they're bringing new employees on?
- I would say that online certificates is a way of demonstrating skill acquisition. Companies are increasingly looking for skills rather than just looking at the degrees. So that's a trend that we have been observing. I think online learners also bring something else to the table and it's that if they were able to manage to take an online course while working, managing their home, their family, their friendships, their lives, and they were able to wake up at Fabian in the morning to review lessons, dedicate Sundays to practice problems and they took this action proactively to upskill themselves. They're demonstrating something, they have something that not everybody has and it's like this grit, this determination, this ability to take action to identify they have some gaps in their knowledge and take action to fill that gap. Companies are increasingly considering that when hiring new people. We were talking earlier about the dynamic environment, how the job market's changing so quickly, how job positions are being transformed and we may not know what is emerging in five years from now. So I think having people in your workforce that is able to upscale themselves and is willing to keep learning and adjust and evolve is very important nowadays as well.
- So Eva, 10 years into this program, are you still seeing hesitations on behalf of companies or hiring folks or CEOs or what other kinds of barriers you see to people getting here for this program?
- I'm seeing the opposite trend.
- Yeah.
- Benjy, I'm observing how 10 years ago when CEOs and executives came to us just to ask for up-skilling their workforce, truly what they had in mind was the traditional way of executive education in person formats. And still this is very effective to be honest, but I'm serving now more and more companies truly observing the benefits of online education to upskill the workforce and especially when they have global teams. Because to offer this education to global teams in many different geographic locations is very effective and very efficient. And also we need to add the component of doing this at a scale and online bring that what we have learned is just to combine different formats and what we are doing is combining asynchronous with synchronous touch points with the professionals, with the employees, with the students, just to keep them engaged with the material. But more than that is just to make them feel that they are part of a cohort, they are part of a group of individuals that are going through the same process and they are not alone. And we found that this is really, really important. We are also trying to provide testimonials, examples of previous professionals that went through that journey and they succeed but they show all of the stones in that journey, and all of the barriers and things that they need to overcome in order to succeed. And these examples are I think are very, very helpful to when you are through this lonely journey, especially when we are talking about a 100% online and asynchronous programs.
- Before we kinda wrap things up a little bit, I wanted to ask about this sort of trending concept, this idea of the future of work. If you're on campus here at MITC, 50% of the events are called blank blank and the future of work. How do you see this program contributing to that and the direction that the future of work is taking? Sort of a bigger broader question.
- I think the future landscape in supply chain management will require continuous upscale and re-skill of the workforce. And I think this lifelong learning is an imperative. I think that now more than ever, we need to also provide to the professionals a good understanding of the fundamental core concepts that are behind the techniques and that are behind the tools because AI tools are very powerful and can bring a lot of support to any role in supply chain management. But we also need to understand when the GEN AI tool is providing us the right answer or the right proposal versus some proposal that is out of place. So an online education I think to provide this core understanding in supply chain management about inventory models, demand forecasting, analytics tools can play a crucial role covering the skill gaps that we have identified that are required in this new landscape.
- Yeah, I also think another element is modularity. I think modularity is gonna be key. As we mentioned earlier, I think the new jobs are being created, we don't even know what the job descriptions are gonna be or what we're gonna need in five to 10 years in the supply chain management field. So enabling these modular learning, it's very important. I think online is an easier way rather than like formal degrees at universities, more traditional ones. So enabling people to create their own pathways for learning, choosing based on the skills they want to develop. Actually that's the way we are working with companies now. Like we have this modular offering so they can actually like pick and choose from our different contents in order to create the choose your own adventure kind of-
- Yeah, your journey.
- Kind of course, right? And so we are doing that with organizations now, but I think the future would be to maybe create something like that also for individuals that can be very powerful.
- And I want to build on that because I fully agree on that point Inma. I want to, in the example of Walmart. Walmart is a company, a big retailer as you know. They are truly investing a lot in up-skilling and re-skilling their workforce. They are offering and they has been offering with us a core course just to update and upskill their workforce focused on core fundamental concepts, inventory management, demand forecasting and transportation management. Recently, they came to us and they say, hey, we want to provide now a custom online course more focused on new trends, more focused on supply chain automation. We want to include supply chain into invisibility, sustainability, thanks to the design of our massive opens courses, specialized courses, and the way we are delivering this online content. The different modules allow us to pick this right content that you just mentioned and prepare an online custom course just for the associates that cover these new trends and this sustainability aspect that they want to bring to them. So I fully agree about this modularity and how this provide flexibility and at the same time how this online education can adapt in a more agile way. I would say to these dynamic changes.
- What should I have asked about the online education programs that I haven't yet? What would you ask each other, that you haven't already? I know you speak to each other every day.
- Maybe something we haven't covered maybe enough is how in the past 10 years since we launched our first massive open online course, how our work has evolved as years passed by, we've been approached more and more by companies and organizations that are struggling with up-skilling their workforce. And what we are bringing to them is not just the content itself and the skills, but same level of opportunities for people anywhere in the world, right? Before they had to rely maybe just on a local university to upskill someone in Spain versus someone in Salvador or someone in Boston. But now they can offer our content to all of them at the same time. They can take it together, have this cohort feeling that increase networking creates a common language for all of them to actually do better their job. Because in many occasions, supply chains are managed by global teams and not just local teams. So I think this is very powerful how these online learning experience and journey, it's creating these stronger teams across the globe. And this is something that companies are bringing to us as something that sometimes they didn't expect to happen. And it's a a great benefit of having this up-skilling program that they can offer to all of them at the same time.
- Thank you for joining us on this episode, Supply Chain Frontiers, and a special thanks of course to guests today, Dr. Eva Ponce and Dr. Inma Borrella for sharing your experiences, very much appreciated. We have been discussing the critical role of online education in preparing the supply chain workforce for the future. As we've heard today, programs like the MITX MicroMasters and the CTL specialized MOOCs are equipping learners and organizations worldwide with skills they need to thrive in a rapidly evolving industry. To explore these programs and more, visit ctl.mi.edu/online-learning. Supply Chain Frontiers is recorded on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our sound editor is David Lashinsky of David Benjamin Sound and our audio engineer today is Kurt Schneider of MIT Audio Visual Services. Our marketing writer is Mackenzie Berry. Be sure to check out previous episodes of Supply Chain Frontiers at ctl.mit.edu/podcasts or search for us on your preferred podcast platform. On behalf of the researchers, instructors, and staff at the MIT Center for Transformational Logistics, I'm Benjy Kantor, thank you for listening.