April 11, 2010 Tsinghua MBA team performs remarkably in MIT Sloan's 6th Annual International Operations Simulation Competition. Tsinghua’s leading team was ahead of the top teams from Stanford, Rochester, Kellogg, Chicago, HEC, Duke, Yale, and Vanderbilt. Darren CHAN, Kevin CHENG, Li-Chia OU, and Ioana SIMION are the members of this leading team, who are all from Tsinghua International MBA program, class of 2011.

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, but covered one year of virtual factory time. Every 20 minutes simulated a day and the team must make suitable decisions. These critical operational decisions were based on throughputs, scheduling, and order acceptance, under the constraint of resources and machine capacity. The final ranking was based upon each team’s cash balance. The team accumulating the highest cash balance won the competition. Making the right decisions at the right moments is critical to the production rates during this complex work-flow process. With intense time pressure and timely decisions, all members in team worked all day long.

Thanks to the comprehensive Operations Management course taught by SEM Associate Professor David Robb, the stellar SEM team formed a solid foundation for the competition. David was the teacher in Department of Management Science and Engineering, achieving PhD from University of Calgary. His research interest lies in inventory management, operations management and strategy. His careful guidance before the competition helped the team a lot.

Members of the Tsinghua MBA team described the competition as an opportunity to interact with students from around the world. Member Ioana said: "Lack of experience and the PK against the 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, another member Darren expressed regret:" 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.”