Undergraduate students in the Naveen Jindal School of Management pitched their data-driven ideas for solving a supply chain problem during a recent competition.
The April 11 event — the Out of the Box Undergraduate Supply Chain Case Competition — was presented by the Jindal School. Three faculty members from the Jindal School’s Operations and Supply Chain Management Area (OM) served as judges.
This year’s challenge, developed from research conducted by Dr. Bin Hu, a professor in the Jindal School’s OM area, involved finding a solution to an age-old problem in the retail sector: reducing long wait lines for the 11 fitting rooms of SmartWear, a fictional near-campus clothing outlet, while at the same time improving customer experience and optimize room allocations without costing the business too much money.
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The panel of judges consisted of Hu, Dr. Negin Enayaty, an OM associate professor of instruction and Dr. Neda Mirzaeian, an OM assistant professor.
Students were tasked with solving the congestion the outlet experienced during peak hours, especially 5-6 p.m., when students, who are SmartWear clients, have finished their classes for the day.
Students from every undergraduate program at the Jindal School were eligible to compete. Over the previous several weeks, more than 80 students from 16 majors and seven double majors formed 33 teams to try their hands at coming up with a solution using skills and techniques they learned in their courses. The top 7 teams advanced to the finals.
D&D (1st place, $750)
- Rushil Kannery (Senior): Finance (FIN)/Marketing (MKTG)
- Nidhi Gelli (Senior): Double Major in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) and Supply Chain Management and Analytics (SCMA)
- Sahiti Maturi (Junior): FIN
Queue Masters (2nd place, $450)
- Naimah Rehman (Senior): SCMA
- Iman Ashfaq (Junior): FIN
5324
- Megha Rao (Senior): Double Major in BAAI/SCMA
- Srishti Garg (Senior): FIN
- Advika Sampath (Senior): Double Major in Computer Information Systems and Technology (CIST)/MKTG
Students for Sustainability Success
- Ashby Preston (Senior): SCMA
- Fedor Kalitin (Junior): SCMA
- Jiayue Ma (Junior): SCMA
Team DC
- Divya Gutti (Senior): Double Major in BAAI/SCMA
- Charleen Cheung (Junior): Accounting
The Fitting Fixers
- Samantha Stidd (Senior): Business Administration (BA)
- Varsha Gupta (Junior): Double Major in FIN/Economics
- Samiha Hossain (Junior): CIST
The SmartLink
- Elizabeth Ci (Junior): BA
- Hasita Pola (Sophomore): SCMA
- Malini Rudra (Freshman): BAAI
D&D took first place. The team’s winning solution involved converting some of the fitting rooms into express fitting rooms for customers with fewer clothing items. The team analyzed different scenarios and arrived at an optimal configuration of five express rooms and 6 regular rooms. The team also proposed the introduction of a mobile app with real-time tracking of room availability which would reduce the wait time that customers perceive and allowed them to reserve rooms in advance.
Nidhi Gelli, a sophomore business analytics and supply chain management double major and honors student on the winning team, said the classes she has taken have prepared her well for the competition. She said the many presentations she had already done for her classes helped inform the first-place one the team developed for the competition.
“I’ve learned a lot of critical thinking and problem-solving skills in my classes,” she said. “In supply chain, there’s so much problem solving that takes place and so much innovative thinking that you have to do — this is a great start to get a feel for how the workforce would be.”
Teammate Sahidi Muturi, a finance junior who will be graduating in December, said her classes have helped her prepare for this competition because they taught her exactly how to tackle the analytical side of this issue with which the students were presented.
“This competition really helped me with the communication side and the problem-solving aspect of it,” she said. “We all worked together to come up with the solutions to find the best way to solve the issue
Teammate Rushil Kannery, a senior double major (finance and marketing) said his finance classes helped him crunch the numbers for the project and his marketing classes taught him how to make proposals more appealing.
“This competition taught me the research skills, the analytical skills, and then how to present that in the best way possible for sure,” he said.
At the conclusion of the event, Hu addressed the students, saying that while winning was important, the most important part of the competition was the fact that the students participated.
“You worked on the problem, you put in your thoughts, and you had this experience that gave you a taste of the thrill of challenging yourself with a real-life and important operations problem. (You learned about) the kind of pleasure it can give you and you will hopefully experience that over and over again in your future career,” he said. “… All of us were very pleasantly surprised by the performance of all the teams, were impressed with the way that you saw outside the box, the way you performed analysis and the way you put them together in some of the slide decks.”
Brussolo said events like this one are organized in collaboration with faculty to give students more opportunities to experience real industry scenarios and strengthen essential skills like problem-solving, teamwork, communication, decisions under uncertainty, and creativity.
“I am always surprised by how students tackle the given problems and look at different ways to solve the case,” she said. “That is why the competition is called Out of the Box — because we want them to think outside the box and apply their creativity to their proposed solution.”
