Moneyball was just the beginning.

The 2011 film, based on a 2003 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, introduced the world to the idea that, rather than obsessively trying to recruit and retain star players, baseball teams can improve their performance by analyzing and optimizing key statistics across their roster.

Nearly a decade later, Professor Timothy Chan believes the time is ripe to take the approach to a whole new level. With funding from a Connaught Global Challenge award, he aims to make U of T a world-leading hub in sports analytics.

“With the rise of advanced video tracking and wearable devices, sports teams have more data than ever before,” says Chan. “The challenge now is for them to interpret, analyze and make use of this data, to transform it into valuable insights.”

Chan is ideally positioned to lead the effort. The director of U of T Engineering’s Centre for Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Engineering (CARTE), he has extensive expertise in big data and optimization. He has published widely on their application to sports such as hockey and collaborated with the Canadian Olympic Committee.

He has even cracked a decades-old open question in baseball analytics, by borrowing classical ideas from industrial engineering – this work was awarded first place in the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2013.

But Chan emphasizes that in order for sports analytics to be effective, it can’t happen in isolation. His large and multidisciplinary team of collaborators includes physicians, kinesiologists, economists, mathematicians, management experts, and computer scientists.

“Everyone has a role to play,” he says.

While the Moneyball approach originally focused on team performance, Chan says there are many other important aspects of sports that can be enhanced through analytics. These include athlete fitness, safety and health, fan engagement, and even the management of fantasy sports or e-sports leagues.

The team has laid out a few “pathfinder projects” that will serve as proof of the concept. One example comes from the world of freestyle snowboarding, where devices known as Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) are used to record athlete data such as acceleration, rotation and heading.

“Our collaborators at the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific have collected IMU data from hundreds of sessions,” says Chan. “The first step will be to take that data and use it to compute metrics such as air time, jump height and take-off speed. Eventually, this should help us uncover the characteristics of successful tricks.”

The plan also includes symposiums and summer schools to help train the next generation of experts in sports analytics. The $250,000 Connaught Global Challenge award will help sustain the project over the next two years.

“My hope is that this award lays a solid foundation for team-building across campus, and sets the university up to be a world leader in this growing area,” says Chan.

“This project embodies the kind of innovative thinking for which our Faculty is known,” says Professor Ramin Farnood, Vice-Dean, Research at U of T Engineering. “Professor Chan has built up an impressive team of collaborators, from a wide range of disciplines, who are poised to make a tremendous, positive impact both here in Canada and around the world.”

-This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on October 5, 2020 by Tyler Irving 

Michael Carter (MIE) is an industrial engineering professor specializing in health care resource modeling. Recently, he has been advising on COVID-19 testing and shared his expertise with CBC News:

He [Carter] suggests that in jurisdictions that continue to make tests available to everyone, it would be more efficient, where possible, to have different sites for those with symptoms and those without. That way testing staff don’t waste time asking the asymptomatic people — often the majority in line — the same list of questions about how they feel, said Carter, who is also a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Toronto.

“If we can get asymptomatic people to go to an open space and line up and get through in one minute, you’re in business.”

Read the full news story, A little engineering, a lot of customer service: What it will take to fix COVID-19 test lineups, on CBC News.

Two U of T Engineering research projects have received a boost from Connaught New Researcher awards.

Professor Merve Bodur (MIE) will investigate new ways to optimize strategic decisions for electric car sharing systems, while Professor Nicolas Papernot (ECE) aims to make machine learning more trustworthy.

The annual awards are only provided to U of T assistant professors within the first five years of a tenured-stream academic appointment to help them establish strong research programs.

“It is a great honour to receive this award,” says Bodur. Her research project aims to develop new mathematical models that can reduce the operating costs of electric car sharing services, while also improving quality of service, making the systems more viable and sustainable.

For example, the models can be used to help system operators determine whether it is more cost-effective to purchase parking lots, or instead make use of free-floating parking permits. They also optimize the locations of car charging stations and even the overall size of the fleet.

“We hope that the new analytical methods will not only advance car sharing systems, but also bike sharing, scooter sharing, and general city planning challenges such as the allocation of parking lots.”

For his part, Papernot and his team will focus on developing algorithms for trustworthy machine learning.

“The widespread adoption of machine learning raises security and societal concerns,” he says. “For instance, learning algorithms can easily be manipulated by adversaries capable of perturbing the data that algorithms analyze.”

By designing machine learning algorithms that can detect and avoid such manipulation, Papernot aims to both increase the algorithms’ ability to learn effectively and responsibly, and to help humans put more trust in machine learning.

“Trustworthiness is instrumental to ensuring a beneficial impact of machine learning,” he says. “We strive to design our experiments in a way that facilitates the translation of our research results into practical techniques and best practices.”

Bodur and Papernot are among 56 principal investigators across U of T to share more than $1 million in funding through the Connaught New Researcher awards.

“Supporting early-career researchers as they build up their programs is a key priority for U of T Engineering,” says Ramin Farnood, Vice-Dean, Research at U of T Engineering. “I look forward to seeing the exciting technologies that will come out of these innovative projects, and the positive impact they will have on our world.”

-This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on September 17, 2020 by Tyler Irving 

A new consortium — featuring players from industry, academia and government — will use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate design of the next generation of high-performance materials, with applications from renewable energy to consumer electronics.

“Materials discovery has always started with what we find in nature. We combine and adapt found materials for properties like strength, elasticity and electrical conductivity,” says Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), the principal investigator of the new consortium. “But what if AI can help us flip this process on its head? Could we start from the properties we’re seeking, and work backwards?”

This is the paradigm-shifting goal of the Alliance for AI-Accelerated Materials Discovery (A3MD), which brings together world-leading researchers from the University of Toronto, McMaster University and the National Research Council of Canada, as well as industrial partners LG and TOTAL.

Together, the team aims to discover advanced materials, both to convert atmospheric CO2 into usable energy and to enhance the performance of consumer products such as bright and vivid displays.

The A3MD co-investigators include:

• Professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik (Chemistry, Computer Science, U of T)
• Professor Cathy Chin (ChemE)
• Professor Drew Higgins (McMaster University)
• Professor David Sinton (MIE)
• Dr. Isaac Tamblyn (National Research Council of Canada)
• Professor Alex Voznyy (Physical and Environmental Sciences, UTSC)

This multidisciplinary team will develop new strategies to address one of the key challenges in the discovery and synthesis of new materials: the immense size of the search space.

“The Materials Project, which aims to provide a computational library of known materials, currently predicts properties for over 700,000 of them,” says Aspuru-Guzik. “But those materials can be combined in myriad ways. There are simply too many possible permutations to try them all.”

Historically, the discovery of functional material has involved informed trial and error — and many trial tests. Moreover, the design of those experiments was subject to human bias: researchers tend to focus in on combinations of elements that their own experience suggest would be interesting.

In 2017, Aspuru-Guzik and Sargent, along with several other collaborators, issued a call to action in the journal Nature, arguing that emerging tools from the fields of AI and machine learning could play a key role in speeding up the search for new high-performance materials.

Properly trained algorithms can sort through vast libraries of simulated materials and recognize promising combinations in a fraction of the time, pointing researchers in fruitful directions.

Ultimately, these materials need to be synthesized and tested in the lab. And here too, AI can help: when combined with advanced robotics, it enables the use of high-throughput screening (HTS).

“With HTS, you can fabricate and test many different materials in parallel, rather than one at a time,” says Sinton. “Robotic devices take care of the repetitive lab work, doing it more quickly and repeatably. HTS is most powerful when guided using AI: each new iteration is informed by the analysis of the one that came before.”

The combination of AI and robotics provides rich opportunities for synergy that benefits all players.

“When looking for practical solutions on such a scale, it’s vital for researchers to cultivate partnerships with industry and other research institutions,” says ECE Chair Professor Deepa Kundur.

“A3MD is an excellent example of an initiative that actively engages perspectives to keep the focus on solutions that will make a tangible difference.”

In the first year, A3MD will put in place the needed infrastructure — including precision robotics — for high-throughput experimentation. The consortium will also convene several machine learning and data science bootcamps, training a new generation of experts, and will also organize a speaker series with leading researchers in the relevant fields. Graduate students and post-doctoral fellows will drive key aspects of the research and professional development strategy for the alliance.

In its second year, A3MD will expand further, adding industry and academic partners who bring additional expertise and offer new avenues to commercialize the novel technologies that will be developed.

“Partnerships are the backbone of innovation,” says Professor Alex Mihailidis (BME, Medicine) , U of T’s Associate Vice-President of International Partnerships. “They find better solutions faster because they bring disparate groups together. A3MD is a great example of U of T’s spirit of collaboration and desire to work alongside such talented and invested partners.”

-This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on September 11, 2020 by Tyler Irving & Matthew Tierney

Professor Aimy Bazylak (MIE) has been elected to the 2020 cohort of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Established in 2014, the College is the country’s first national system of multidisciplinary recognition for the emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leadership.

As the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Thermofluidics for Clean Energy, Bazylak is working to advance fuel cells, electrolyzers and batteries for the production of clean power and energy storage without greenhouse gas emissions. Her research is focused on the use of modelling and real-time imaging to design new materials for high efficiency and performance.

Bazylak is an international leader in understanding the multiphase and microscale transport processes involved with polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells and electrolyzers. Her research group is the first in North America to visualize operating polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells using synchrotron X-ray radiography; this work has accelerated the advancement of water and carbon dioxide electrolysis at a pace that would not otherwise have been possible.

Based on the insights gained through her fundamental research, Bazylak has partnered with automotive and energy companies such as Nissan, Volkswagon and Hydrogenics Corp. to develop next-generation fuel cells and electrolyzers for higher efficiency, zero-greenhouse gas emission power and energy storage.

Bazylak served as the Director of the U of T Institute for Sustainable Energy from 2015 to 2018. She is Associate Chair, Research and Energy Systems Option Chair for the Division of Engineering Science and has served on the President’s Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability since 2017. She is a fellow of CSME and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Bazylak’s contributions have earned her several prestigious awards, including the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) I.W. Smith Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and the Helmholtz International Fellow Award. Most recently, she received U of T‘s McLean Award, which recognizes early-career researchers and supports outstanding research.

“Professor Bazylak has made incredibly innovative contributions to the field of sustainable energy, both in terms of fundamental knowledge and practical impact,” says Chris Yip, Dean of U of T  Engineering. “Warmest congratulations to her on being recognized as one of the next generation of world-leading Canadian scholars and for being such an inspiration to our students.”

-This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on September 8, 2020 by Carolyn Farrell

During a typical academic year, Professor Chirag Variawa’s (ISTEP) pre-lecture ritual involved taking a walk and listening to music before making his way into the Lee & Margaret Lau Auditorium, a large collaborative space in the Myhal Centre that seats nearly 500 people. Inside, the room would be filled to near-capacity with first-year engineering students.

“I’d fire up the laptop, the screen turns on, and the room goes quiet,” says Variawa. “Students are looking ahead at me, at the screen, and it’s time to teach.”

Variawa teaching a first-year course in the Lee & Margaret Lau Auditorium in February 2020. (Photo: Daria Perevezentsev)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This fall, as the U of T Engineering community gets set to begin classes remotely, Variawa’s prep — and his peers’ — is looking much different. Professors have used the summer to reimagine their course delivery and reassess their teaching approaches.

Variawa is teaching APS 100: Orientation to Engineering this fall, a course taken by more than 1,000 first-year engineering students in a variety of different disciplines.

“It’s difficult to lecture off into the ether to 1,000 students,” says Variawa. “We’re so used to looking around the classroom to gauge their interest in these concepts.”

To keep students immersed in topics such as engineering ethics, academic integrity, as well as equity, diversity and inclusion, he’s taking advantage of some high-tech equipment to give his lectures some polish and reflect his creativity.

At home, Variawa has set up a green-screen background, a professional microphone and camera, as well as three monitors. The background allows for him to appear alongside his slides as he lectures, and even to make cameos in videos he’ll be showing the class.

Variawa’s remote-teaching setup. (Photo courtesy of Chirag Variawa)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The course’s Teaching Assistants (TA) will also facilitate virtual breakout sessions, an opportunity for active learning, discussions, “and to build rapport, a sense of community, between students and their instructors,” says Variawa.

While Variawa has found digital solutions to present his lectures, Professor Marianne Touchie (CivMin) is redefining what it means to “chalk and talk” for her course, CIV 375/575: Building Science.

Touchie’s classes will be delivered using light boards in place of chalk boards, as well as a mix of tablet screen capture, green-screen lectures, motion graphics and interactive activities. She is also hoping to create a virtual three-dimensional house for students to explore as part of their labs.

“It would be so neat to teach students how components of a building fit together by enabling them to see into the walls to closely study the materials,” she explains.

Touchie acknowledges she’s had a head start: she and Professor Kim Pressnail (CivMin) began creating filmed lectures in 2018 to eventually support a flipped-classroom experience. As a result, Building Science already has more than 100 lecture videos ready to go.

“Our current situation gives us a chance to iterate how we’re using with these video resources,” says Touchie. Over the summer, she and Pressnail have redesigned the course framework with new modes of engagement and assessment. Touchie says the emphasis will be on fostering discussions and collaborative group projects, allowing students to build relationships with their peers.

Undergraduate and graduate students are usually huddled together in groups or sitting face-to-face in APS 500: Negotiation in an Engineering Context, taught by Professor Elham Marzi (ISTEP). The course explores small and big negotiation scenarios in industry. The grand finale is a United Nations-style, multi-party, multi-stakeholder roundtable negotiation meeting.

Students caucusing in the hallways last academic term during APS 500: Negotiation in an Engineering Context. (Photo courtesy of Elham Marzi)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Students get really into it — they debate each other, caucus in the hallway, build coalitions, and they pound their fists on the table,” says Marzi. “For this term, I had to think, how do we get students to be as engaged and be able to express themselves in the same way?”

Marzi says she isn’t necessarily rewriting the script this fall term — negotiations lectures will be done using the software package BB Collaborate instead of in-person — however her classes will still have many opportunities for students to practice their newly honed negotiation skills.

When students are given role-playing scenarios to practice, they will be paired and grouped differently each time. The virtual spaces will also allow students to record their negotiations to better assess themselves and give feedback to partners.

Marzi teaching through BB Collaborate this spring. (Photo courtesy of Elham Marzi)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“That feedback is going to be immensely valuable and unique,” adds Marzi. “Up until now, we’d rarely been able capture a play-by-play of a negotiation.”

For Professor Natalie Enright Jerger (ECE), the focus this summer wasn’t on how she’d adapt her course online — she’ll use a combination of pre-recorded lectures and live demonstrations — but rather a reassessment of her teaching philosophy.

“The adjustment to working and learning from home was tough for everybody. I felt a lot of anxiety about how to balance work and taking care of my daughter,” says Enright Jerger. “I’m looking at this course through the lens of compassion and empathy — I’m trying to put myself in my students’ shoes. If I’m feeling this unsure, what must they be feeling? How can I be there to support them?”

Professor Natalie Enright Jerger. (Photo: Neda Demiri)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enright Jerger has filmed a welcome video for ECE 253: Digital and Computer Systems, where she not only introduces the course, but shares details about herself and the challenges she has faced since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I also address what I perceive as challenges my students could be facing, whether they’re feeling isolated, or are struggling with sharing their space, or are providing care for loved ones,” says Enright Jerger, whose TAs will also be making similar videos. “Getting to know each other is going to be such a challenge this term. I want them to know I’m open to hearing about their challenges.”

In MIE 303/311: Mechanical and Thermal Energy Conversion, a major component in students’ learning experience is getting to observe the internationally unique, real-life heat engines in the Energy Lab, located in the Mechanical Engineering Building.

“The switch to remote delivery gives us an opportunity to improve access for all students.” — Professor Aimy Bazylak

To replicate this online, Professor Aimy Bazylak (MIE) worked with Tomas Bernreiter, laboratory engineer and manager, and TA Raymond Guan (MIE MASc candidate) to film high-resolution videos to showcase up-close details of the Energy Lab’s engines and turbines. The videos feature Jason Chan (MIE MASc candidate) and other TAs leading students through experiments and a detailed look of the various working pieces of the engines.

“The switch to remote delivery gives us an opportunity to improve access for all students. In a normal setting, we have groups of five to 15 with each engine, and there will inevitably be some who get a better view and enhanced engagement with the lab,” explains Bazylak. “These videos will help facilitate smaller-group interactions between students and TAs and improve access for all students, as we strive to deliver the best possible lab experience.”

Bazylak says that pivot from an in-person experience to an online experience has allowed her to reflect on her role as an educator, as well as the tools and approach she’ll use to effectively teach, even after the pandemic is over.

“This pandemic has forced me to re-examine how I can best add value to the learning experience — it’s not just about delivering the information and giving students the opportunity to learn,” says Bazylak.

“Key measures of success for me will be the engagement I can achieve with my students and how much they value their time in my lectures, tutorials and labs. By teaching remotely, I can engage with students in new ways that will bring value to my virtual class now, and my literal classroom down the line.”

-This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on August 27, 2020 by Liz Do

Professor Javad Mostaghimi (MIE) and his team using coating expertise to enhance anti-microbial properties of face masks

A U of T Engineering team is developing a new way to coat minute particles of copper onto the inside of fabrics, such as those used in face masks. The technology could provide an additional layer of safety to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

The goal is to deposit very fine copper particles onto both woven and non-woven fabrics using twin-wire arc (TWA) spray technology. This fabric will then be used in one of the layers of a reusable fabric face mask. It’s anticipated this copper-embedded fabric will not affect filter or flow rate parameters and will be able to irreversibly kill most viral and other pathogens within a few minutes.

By embedding the copper into the fabric, the masks will provide a continuous and proactive fight against the transmission of current and evolving harmful pathogens without altering the physical barrier properties of the masks.

The anti-microbial properties of copper have been observed since ancient times — Egyptian and Babylonian soldiers would place bronze shavings in their wounds to reduce infection and speed up healing. Today, Professor Javad Mostaghimi (MIE) and his team — including co-investigators Professor Mohini Sain (MIE), Dr. Larry Pershin (MIE), Professor James A. Scott (Public Health) and Professor Maurice Ringuette (Cell & Systems Biology) — are exploiting these same anti-microbial properties to develop coatings that safeguard everything from office furniture to personal protective equipment, such as masks.

“If we can harness the anti-microbial properties of copper to improve the effectiveness of reusable face masks we can significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19 and do a better job at protecting both our frontline workers and our community at large,” says Mostaghimi.

Mostaghimi directs the Centre for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT), and has studied the impact of copper coatings on healthcare-associated infections for years. He has seen first-hand how copper coatings can be used on high-touch surfaces to help kill bacteria.

In one study, a copper coating was applied to the handles of half the chairs in a Toronto General Hospital waiting room. Over the course of five months they saw that the chairs with copper coatings had a 68 percent reduction of viable bacteria cells per centimetre square.

Current research from other groups shows COVID-19 surviving two to three days on stainless steel and even longer on other surfaces, however it has been demonstrated that the coronavirus particles were inactivated within four hours when exposed to a copper-coated surface at room temperature.

“Traditionally, implementing copper coatings would be very expensive,” Mostaghimi explains. “But our research has developed a method that makes applying copper coatings more economically viable.”

The CACT method is known as twin-wire arc spray. The “wire” part refers to the fact that the raw copper is supplied in the form of copper wire, which is more affordable than copper powders. The spray rates allow for large surfaces to be coated efficiently.

Another advantage is that the TWA method allows for the spray parameters to be controlled so that even heat-sensitive surfaces — such as wood, fabrics and even cardboard — can be coated.

Mostaghimi and his team were awarded an Alliance Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to explore the possibility applying the TWA method to create copper-embedded fabrics for manufacturing reusable face masks.

For their project titled Copper Embedded Fabrics and Face masks for Rapid, Irreversible Destruction of COVID-19, Mostaghimi and his team are collaborating with Green Nano Technologies Inc. who will produce a pilot set of the copper embedded face masks.

“Using our TWA spray technology, we will be able to produce copper embedded masks at a marginally more expensive cost than N95 surgical face masks,” says Dr. Larry Pershin, the Centre Manager at the CACT.

“Additionally, as copper degrades both DNA and RNA genetic material, the masks will have the added benefit of irreversibly inactivating all microbial pathogens, regardless of their mutation rates even after masks were disposed.”

Various copper concentrations will be tested on the fabrics to help determine the optimal parameters for destroying the virus. The copper-embedded fabrics will be tested by Professor Maurice Ringuette of U of T’s Department of Cell & Systems Biology. Ringuette and his team will use the fluid released from virus-infected bacteria when ruptured, called bacteriophage lysates, to simulate the COVID virus on the masks.

The research has potential health and safety benefits that could extend beyond the end of the current pandemic. To have affordable, reusable anti-viral PPE available for healthcare workers could mean a decrease in disease transmission in healthcare facilities and a reduction in healthcare-associated infections.

-Published August 31, 2020 by Lynsey Mellon, lynsey@mie.utoronto.ca

The economic impact of COVID-19 has rippled through industries across the world. Businesses everywhere have dealt with sudden closures, new health and safety rules and disruptions to the supply chain.

For alumnus Dan Chan (IndE 9T0), vice president of supply chain strategy at Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC), the pandemic has presented the greatest challenge of his career, testing his expertise in industrial engineering as he worked to rapidly solve problems and ensure the company continues to offer the highest level of customer service.

As COVID-19 cases in Canada rapidly spiked in March, schools closed, and home essentials such as bathroom tissue began flying off the shelves. Meanwhile, Canadian Tire’s supply-chain team had begun planning for the pandemic as early as December.

Since graduating from U of T Engineering, Chan has worked in supply chain management for 27 years. Over his 24 years at CTC, he says he’s had the pleasure of working alongside many industrial engineers whose expertise has been integral to the operational success of the supply chain.

“Industrial engineers maximize service levels while balancing inventory, warehouse and transportation needs within the supply chain,” explains Chan. “They play a prominent, crucial role.”

Network modelling, for example, is used to help deploy inventory, while human factors design is integral to improving ergonomics and optimizing distribution centre layouts. And with Canadian Tire having one of the largest fleets of automatic guided vehicles in North America, automation is regularly used within the distribution centres. What’s more, with huge amounts of raw data to analyze and interpret, industrial engineers regularly make recommendations to increase efficiencies and manage bottlenecks in order to provide customers with what they need.

Along with the question of how the virus in China would affect the supply chain, there was the question of how Canadian Tire stores would be impacted as COVID-19 began to appear in North America. As cases rose in Ontario, non-essential businesses were asked to close to help contain the virus and lighten the burden on the Canadian health-care system.

On March 19, SportChek and Mark’s — stores under the CTC umbrella — were closed to the public as a step to help curb the spread of the virus. On April 4, Canadian Tire stores in Ontario, which make up 40 percent of the store network, temporarily shut their doors. But online sales were still available.

“We saw a huge surge — shopping levels higher than during our Black Friday sales,” says Chan.

The unprecedented jump in e-commerce wasn’t the only new challenge to deal with — certain items were in huge demand. With gyms closed, customers were looking to order exercise equipment and weights online to begin building their at-home workout routines. These items were five times more popular than before the pandemic and at first, it was difficult to meet the unpredictable levels of demand.

Industrial engineering tactics allowed CTC to optimize the processes in their distribution nodes to fulfill customer orders. By taking in and analyzing huge amounts of data resulting from online orders, Canadian Tire could identify potential bottlenecks in the process as well as identify the capacity of various distribution nodes to help determine where to send the work to get orders out on time and as quickly as possible.

As distribution nodes adapted to manage the huge amount of online sales, stores were slowly able to open again in Ontario.

On May 9, Canadian Tire stores in Ontario reopened to the public and by mid-May, SportChek and Mark’s across Canada would follow. This brought a new slew of challenges to ensure both employees and customers could be safe while shopping. Practicing physical distancing and personal protective equipment (PPE) would all be part of the new normal in warehouses, distribution centres and retail stores. Canadian Tire needed to source and distribute PPE to all of their employees and be sure all their operations met the rigorous safety protocols set out by health and safety experts — all changes that were informed through data analysis by CTC’s industrial engineering team.

CTC has implemented health and safety protocols in its 1,700 retail locations and distribution centres, as the company continues to adapt and explore new ways to meet the increased customer demand for storefront and e-commerce options.

“One of the key principles we embrace in supply chain management is resiliency,” says Chan. We have a plan, and a back-up plan and know how to make quick decisions, adjust and move forward.”

-Published August 25, 2020 by Lynsey Mellon, lynsey@mie.utoronto.ca