Carey comes in first at MIT Operations Simulation Competition

For the second consecutive year, a Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School student team took top prize at the annual MIT Sloan Operations Simulation Competition, held April 17-19, 2020, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while a second Carey team captured third place. The competition was the 16th of a global contest attracting participants from top business schools.

Facing formidable competition from 120 others, including teams from Berkeley Haas, Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School, INSEAD, London Business School, MIT Sloan, Northwestern Kellogg, NYU Stern, and Yale School of Management, the Carey team won the $3,000 first-place prize in what is considered the toughest quantitative challenge for any business graduate student. Another Carey team, finishing third, was awarded $500.  

The challenge presented to all schools was a 48-hour-long simulated game in bailing out a hypothetical near-bankrupt firm and subsequently making it as profitable as possible, by revamping its supply chain, hiring and training talents, pricing in response to market intelligence, balancing product lines, investing in capacity, seeking financing from banks, streamlining inventory, and improving customer relations. The intensive experience called upon students’ top-notch analytics, operations, and leadership skills, among other talents. Teams were ranked by their ending cash balances.

The winning Carey team named “Hoperator,” consisting of MS in Marketing program students Yetian (Trevor) Hu, Tianyue (Candice) Tang, and Tianhao Xu, finished the online simulation competition with a cash balance of more than $19 million. The third-place team, dubbed “Nimbler” and including Xuming Zhang (Global MBA) and Jiayang Li (MS in Marketing), finished at $17 million.  All the other teams finished at $15 million or less.

Two other Carey teams participated in the competition as well. Team “y1s1:” Yigi Xu, Wenjuan Li, Rongqian Yao, and Xinyan Gong (all MS in Finance students) finished at no. 55; and Team "S4c:" Caleb Unni, Shang Liu, Shailesh Rishi, and Srinitya Duppanapudi-Satya (all Global MBA students), placed at no. 65.

“This competition is the ‘Olympics of Supply Chain Analytics,’“ said Tinglong Dai, associate professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics, lead instructor of the Operations Management curriculum, and the faculty adviser to Carey’s MIT Sloan Competition teams for the past six years. Dai worked intensely on practices and Q&A sessions with each team prior to the competition. “Our MBA and MS students have proven they are the top talents in supply chain and data analytics, in this challenging time that needs those skills more than ever. They are ready for the post-COVID world of supply chains and represent the spirit of Carey — we build for what's next,” he added. 

In a congratulatory email to Dai, a simulation designer of the competition wrote, "Congratulations professor, to you, your students, and your school! This certainly speaks very well of the quality of the education at Johns Hopkins."

“Schools like MIT Sloan, Berkeley Haas, and Michigan Ross had dominated the no. 1 position for years, until our students finished no. 1 last year,” said Dai.  “And, we just did it again.”