Tsinghua MBA team participated in MIT Sloan's 6^thAnnual International Operations Simulation Competition and won the Stellar award for remarkable performance on April 11, 2010.

The MBA team, ranked 15 in the competition, came out ahead of 59 teams from around 40 top business schools worldwide, including Stanford, Rochester, Kellogg, Chicago, HEC, Duke, Yale, and Vanderbilt.

The team is composed of four 2009 international MBA students of SEM: Darren Chan, Kevin Cheng, Li-Chia Ou and Ioana Simon.

MIT describes the annual contest as a chance to “compete with MBA students from around the world to see who can run the most profitable factory.” The competition was hosted by Responsive Learning Technologies, using the company’s Littlefield Technologies factory simulator. It lasted for 72 hours in real time, covering one year of virtual operative time. Every 20 minutes simulated a day and the team must make appropriate decisions. These critical decisions were based on a variety of factors, including throughputs, scheduling, orders, as well as the constraint of resources and machine capacity. Making right decisions at the right moments is critical to the promotion of productivity during the complex work-flow process. With intense time pressure and demanding decisions to make, all members in team worked all day long.

The final ranking was decided by each team’s cash balance at the end of the simulation.

Members of the Tsinghua MBA team described the competition as an opportunity to interact with students from around the world. Ioana said: "Lack of experience and the PK against world’s top MBA students made us nervous before the competition. Besides, the competition requires a comprehensive understanding of mathematics, information technology and strategy. Fortunately, four players in our team are from different countries with various professional backgrounds. This international view and multi-major ensured the favorable competition result. This fully demonstrates that the capabilities of our students can easily measure up to and surpass the students of other top MBA schools around the world.” However, according to Darren, the result is far from ideal:"Our mission was to enter the top three. With strong background in mathematics and information technology, we regarded this ambition as proper. However, the time schedule was tight. We had courses to take and companies to investigate. The following consequence was that we can only guarantee two members per day to fully execute the contest. If we have gone all out, the result would be better.”

The Operations Management course taught by SEM’s Associate Professor David Robb is believed to have provided substantial support for the team. David Robb is also the supervisor for the participant team in the competition. (Source: MBA Program)