Moving toward the End of 1st Term

Hi everyone, it’s nice talking to you all again! I hope you’re doing well. Now it’s the 9^th week. Can’t believe how time flies! It’s only 1 more week of studying and 1 more for exam, and then Christmas & New Year break. I’m so looking forward to it 😛 Well, before that, let’s review what we did in the past week.

We just submitted our first assignment the week before last. So last week was like a relaxing week for us (really?). There was a guest speaker session, by Mr. Trevor Warner, for our Inventory & Operations Management subject. Mr. Warner works as the Factory Director for IAC – International Automotive Components, Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) first tier supplier. He came to share his experience about shop floor management and sequencing in the factories. He matched real practices, done in his company, with theories and concepts we learnt in class. This really helps us. Since we now get the clearer picture of how sequencing is actually implemented in actual business scenarios.

We’re the curious crews; constantly asking questions. Mr. Warner was very kind and always attentively answered our questions.

Mr. Warner also brought some sample parts of what IAC supplies to JLR. Can you guess which part of the car is this?

Another part 🙂

There was also a small quiz in our Freight and Transport (FRT) class. It was like a small game to test our knowledge after the lesson. It was fun and educative. Everyone enjoyed it.

Another excited thing is choosing electives! There’re 13 subjects (Logistics Outsourcing, Performance Measurement, Simulation, Master Data, Humanitarian Logistics, Supply Chain Resilience, for instance). Each of them is very interesting. But we can only choose 4 out of them. What a shame right? It was so hard for me and my friends to choose. We had several heated discussions about it. Well, in the end, we had to choose our top 4 most favourite. We’re looking forward to the courses and what we can learn from them in the next term!

And in today’s FRT class, we had a chance for hands-on experience of using Paragon Program.

The FRT class’s atmosphere – classroom was changed from our usual one to the computer lab.

The program is a business program widely used for routing road freight delivery. First, demand data, constraints (number of trucks, trucks’ capacity, driver’ working hours, delivery windows), along with other data were input into the system. Then we clicked routing, and let Paragon do the magic. It only took a few seconds for routing to be mapped. We were given with a similar task, to manually map delivery points within our learning teams. Even though, there were only around 35 delivery points, it took us quite a few hours to do it. Can’t imagine if we have at least 1,000 customers, we probably have to use the whole day! Well, in the past, freight operators had to do it that way. But once routing programs, like Paragon, have been introduced, our lives have become much easier. It was a good chance for students like us to explore and familiarise ourselves with a professional program like this. It was interesting and we had much fun trying different routing.

This is the manual map. We spent quite a while on this. Look at all those scribbles!

Routing done by the program, only took like 10 seconds! We compared the computerized one with our manual one to see the differences, too.

Alrighty, that’s about it. Gotta go now. Hope you enjoy the blog. See you again next time! 🙂

A little charge up before going back to study!