A group of  four students from the Industrial and Systems Engineering department and EBIT faculty along with their lecturer and mentor Dr Olufemi Adetunji, have been selected to represent the University of Pretoria and South Africa in the Netherlands for the grand finale week of The Supply Chain Finance Community’s Global Student Challenge.

Teams from universities and business schools across the globe annually compete against each other in The Cool Connection Global Student Challenge. The teams have to save a fictional company that manufactures personal care products. As the company is suffering severe losses, a new management team has to be appointed and each student takes a role in this team. The assignment is to make the company profitable again by realizing the highest possible return on investment. The participants do this by making strategic and tactical decisions to optimise the complete supply chain.

The participation of students has been as follows:

• the Qualification Rounds,      (June – October 2015, competing with 96 countries)
• the Global Rounds                  (November-December 2015, competing with 38 countries)
• leading to the Grand Finale   (April 2016, selected in the top 22 teams in the world)

The students are heading to Zwolle, Netherlands where the finals will be held from 11 - 16 April 2016. The students will be competing against the world’s best teams.

Internships and cash prizes will be awarded by international companies to the winners.

The Faculty of Engineering, Built-Environment is extremely proud of its students in Industrial Engineering and wishes them the very best with this global challenge.