Business Students Reach Top Five in Fresh Connection APICS Global Student Challenge in New Orleans
The Fresh Connection AUC team included: Ragia Amr, economics; Sara El Alfi, marketing; Kareem Karam, architecture and Mostafa El Abd, mechanical engineering.
“With the support of Dr. Ahmed Tolba, chair of the Department of Marketing, and Dr. Ali Awni, operations management professor, we were able to get the consent to participate in this competition,” said El Alfi.
The Fresh Connection APICS Global Student Challenge is part of the APICS, the premier event for supply chain and operations management professionals.
For the competition, the team was assigned a company of fresh juices that is making negative returns on investment, and, as a team, they were supposed to manage its manufacturing, from its suppliers to its customers, to bring it back to positive returns on investment to make the Fresh Connection a profitable company again within three rounds.
More than 1,400 students in 350 teams from universities in 66 countries entered the first round last March. In the final round, one team was selected from each continent, seven from the United States and one from Canada to go to New Orleans for competition and APICS 2014 conference last October.
To prepare for the competition, the team started taking training courses in Just Supply Chain (JSC), a platform built by Entrepreneurial Industry Pioneers in the Supply Chain world, to provide field’s professionals and students with world-class industry services to equip them with the right mindset to realize their ultimate career potential.
“As we were the only team of students in the simulation from Egypt, we were given high recognitions and supported greatly. We passed all three rounds with a positive return on investment and are first on Africa and the Middle East,” said El Alfi.
Being one of the top five teams, they were required to present their work at the APICS 2014 conference, which brought together more than 1,000 supply chain professionals from around the world.
“Our presentation took place in a conference room where one hundred and fifty professionals and students attended [and] were given great recognition,” said El Abd.
Inspired by their experience at the competition, they started promoting the competition on campus. In collaboration with the Business Association, they organized a competition for the teams to enter the 2015 Fresh Connection APICS Global Student Challenge, which the final round will take place in Las Vegas, USA. JSC will be giving on-campus trainings on supply chain for the students in the competition.
The AUC School of Business encourages its students to participate in local and international competitions, which are an excellent opportunity for them to enhance and develop various skills including time management, problem solving, leadership, team work and, most importantly, their competitiveness, as well as become global citizens, preparing them to become global business leaders.
