UA Operations Management Team Finishes 9th in International Competition

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — A four-member team of operations management graduate students from The University of Alabama’s Manderson Graduate School of Business placed ninth in the Avnet Tech Games RedPrairie Supply Chain Challenge.

The event, sponsored by Avnet and Red Prairie, included 105 teams and 351 students from 46 colleges and universities around the world, with 97 teams successfully completing the competition.

The event is a virtual competition using a customized, web-based version of the Littlefield Technologies game from Responsive Learning Technologies. Students manage a make-to-order factory by forecasting and making capacity, inventory and contract decisions.  The winning team is the one that manages the factory assets (inventory, equipment and cash) to earn the most money.

The winning team this year was from Vanderbilt University. The team achieved a game ending cash balance (score) of $3,149,778. The UA team produced a cash balance of $2,522,401, finishing behind Vanderbilt, New York University, Arizona State (two teams), Virginia (two teams) and Indiana.

Members of The University of Alabama team include Ibrahim Capar, Shirley (Rong) Li, Abhay Lidbe and Zhi Wang. All of the students are doctoral students except Capar, who is a second-year MBA student from Turkey with a concentration in supply chain operations management.

Abhay Lidbe (from India) and Zhi Wang (from China) are first-year operations management doctoral students, and Shirley Li (from China) is a third-year operations management doctoral student.

“Even though the students never played this game prior to the competition, they have played other supply chain games in OM (operations management) courses,” said Dr. Burcu Keskin, assistant professor of operations management information systems, statistics & management science. 

“The spreadsheet and analysis skills that they have mastered in the program helped them obtain a strong performance in the game.”

Avnet is one of the world’s largest trans-national electronics distributors of electronic parts, enterprise computing and storage products and embedded subsystems and is a major player in the technology supply chain. RedPrairie is a global company that delivers productivity solutions to help companies in three categories—inventory, transportation and workforce.