A team of first-year students from the Yale School of Management (SOM) won the 2007 Operations Simulation Competition this month, beating out 62 other teams of M.B.A. students from business schools around the world.
The Yale team, called "yalewillwin," included Gene Lee, Krishan Soni, Garan Geist and Robert Doherty.
The competition ran -- entirely online -- from April 9 through 11. Each team was responsible for running a simulated factory that manufactured digital satellite system receivers, using the Littlefield Technologies factory simulation.
The manufacturing process had four steps carried out at three different work stations. Students controlled factors such as lot size, inventory reorder point and the number of machines working at each station. The Littlefield Technologies simulation was designed to teach basic concepts of operations, such as capacity planning, scheduling and inventory management. The winning team was the one that finished 250 simulated days of operation with the most money.
The Yale team earned $1,506,261 over the course of the simulation, compared with the $1,457,789 made by the second-place team and the $7,470 that could be earned if the simulation was run without making any changes to its original parameters.
The competition was hosted by the Sloan Operations Management Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of their M.B.A. classes, the competing teams had already played a more basic version of the Littlefield simulation. At Yale, it took place in the "Operations Engine" course, a part of SOM's new core curriculum.
"'Operations Engine' was my favorite course, and we applied a number of the things we learned in the course to the competition," says Lee. "The contest was a fun thing to do on the side, but what we learned in 'Operations Engine' is also very practical and relevant to my post-M.B.A. career."
"Operations Engine" was taught by Art Swersey, professor of operations research, who encouraged the students to enter the contest. "I'm delighted that our team won and especially pleased that they were able to apply the quantitative tools they learned in our program," he says.
The Littlefield factory simulation was developed and is marketed by Responsive Learning Technologies. Sam Wood of Responsive Learning Technologies says, "I designed the problem for the MIT competition to be much more challenging than the assignments typically used in courses."
The prize for winning the contest is $500.
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