IAP 2016 – Sook Mui

08 Feb 16

Wong Sook Mui

IAP trip to MIT Jan 2016 was great experience to me personally as this is an honor to join other 116 students from 25 countries that have same passion as I am in supply chain management, we shared our thoughts and build great network during these 3 weeks in Boston.

Guest speaker’s session were among the best. Listening to our industrial leaders from various great companies such as Walmart, BASF, P&G, GSK and others were among most interesting and beneficial. I find the leaders’ view in global supply chain management, sharing their experiences empower and broad up my view, knowing how they succeed in this field inspired me well.

Tour to Boston Scientific and Walgreens was great trip where an eye opening how the warehouse distribution system were carry out physically in proper systematic and well-disciplined working condition really brought the theory to be live broadcasting.

APICS and SCALE Challenge emphasized how a team should be working together despite different background and thinking getting aligned to make things happened were challenging. The games reflects real industrial working conditions and proved that there are multi ways to get the ROI to be positive. Team work is the success key factors.

Nevertheless, being the one of four part-time student join this IAP program, I do feel a miss in this expedition. There are:

• Missed communication between organizer and students causing us staying away from the group, we missed some of the evening network building activities due to distance and transportation issue. MISI should provide proper guideline that all students should stay together or at least nearby MIT avoid bad weather issue (Snow Storm). We are lucky that whole 3 weeks weather condition were great and we didn’t miss the class
• Poor organization at MISI, all 4 PSCM students profile were not printed in MIT GLOBAL SCALE NETWORK 2016 STUDENT PROFILE BOOK despite our participant were confirmed 3 months before the event. We feel we are aliens and not recognized. We complained about it but no actions taken, we wonder why nobody taking an action to at least print (or photocopy) the additional 4 person profile to be added to the profile book and distribute. The mistake was not recognized and no corrective action taken. We are deeply disappointed our profile was not included in 2016 Student Profile Book.
• After 3 weeks participated in the classes, again, all 4 PSCM students still missed to have name tags during Poster Presentation night. Loh and Lorriance has to hand-written their name tags during the event and that really put us to the lowers point of disappointment. We thank Satya for his last-minute arrangement to print the name tag for us after my harsh complaints.

I wish to thanks to IAP organizer for the great course but I also urge my voice is being heard by MISI management team that lesson should be learnt and our coming batch students that join the IAP in 2017 will not have what Jackson, Hilmi (2015) and Loh, Wong, Lorraince and Sim bad experience