It was a fantastic learning experience. That’s how I would describe the week I spent there. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the most prestigious universities. And the Supply Chain department is widely considered one of the best in the world. It would have been hard to imagine that the online course I started almost three years ago resulted in studying in person at MIT, in a fantastic learning experience.

During the last 3 years EdX, the online learning platform, has been running a series of courses in Supply Chain. I talked about these many times before. They cover a wide spectrum of Supply Chain topics. From traditional inventory management to Enterprise Resource Management systems. One of the most interesting aspects is that these courses had students from all around the world. The quality of the content and the faculty made them amongst the most popular ones on EdX.

These Supply Chain courses served as the basis for two certifications. The first one was called X-Series. And a second and more comprehensive one, the Micromaster. Which is an official credential in EdX. This required finishing all 5 courses and doing a proctored comprehensive exam. After everything was said and done the MIT faculty went above and beyond and decided to create an in-person program which was specially crafted for the students of these Supply Chain courses. This is called the SCx Bootcamp. It’s an executive education class that builds on top of the previous SCx courses, it requires having completed at least a minimum number of classes in order to be admitted.

The classes are a mix of lectures, research briefs, and most importantly, business cases. Many of the students in the bootcamp (including myself) have never been to business school. So the business case discussion format was a bit unusual. But after having done a few of them I think many of us appreciated how rich and instructive they can be. The business cases that we discussed including state of the art Supply Chains such as Apple and Walmart, which were not only interesting, but also applicable in our day to day jobs. As a matter of fact, we had alumni from Apple and Walmart in class.

The faculty at MIT was great, and they prepared a great mix of content and discussions. And the set of students that participated had a wide variety of backgrounds, across functional areas and industries. There were students coming from several dozen countries around the world, including Australia, Japan, China, Honduras, Mexico, France, Italy and many others. I think many of us will benefit from the networking opportunity. I’m looking forward to meet again in the future. All in all it was a fantastic experience and a great group of people.