UA Team Wins Prestigious Supply Chain Competition

Northwest Arkansas

by Paul Gatling ([email protected]) November 7, 2012 9:46 am 86 views 

The University of Arkansas has won the BCS national championship — of supply chain management.

A UA team from the Sam M. Walton College of Business won the third annual Bowersox Supply Chain Challenge, a prestigious event held Oct. 25-26 at Michigan State University. Nine of the 15 top-ranked schools in supply chain management competed in the competition, according to a UA-issued news release.

The UA team was made up of MBA students in the supply chain management department in the Walton College. Ohio State finished second and Michigan State third.

“It’s equivalent to winning the BCS championship in football,” department chairman Mathew Waller said in the release. “The programs that were competing there were top programs with decades of history.

“The fact that we beat all of those schools shows the MBA students in the Sam M. Walton College of Business are as good or better than any in the top 10.”

Zack Hall, Amberle Morgan, Jason Schloss and XiaoYan Zheng represented the UA. They earned $5,000, half of which they’ll donate to the university’s Full Circle Campus Food Pantry, a student-run assistance program that distributes food and personal products to members of the campus community.

It is the university’s second win at a national supply chain management competition this year, according to the release.

“We were pumped up,” Hall, of Springdale, said in the release.

Hall graduated from the UA in December 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in transportation and logistics.

“We felt like we didn’t make any mistakes. When you are going up against schools like Michigan State, Ohio State and Carnegie Mellon, it earns their respect. All those schools know that we mean business down here and we know what we are doing when it comes to supply chain management.”

In April, Arkansas won the IANA Logistics & Supply Chain Management Case Competition at the University of North Florida, finishing ahead of the defending champion, the University of Tennessee.

Last year, U.S. News & World Report ranked the UA’s supply chain management/logistics specialty 10th among the public undergraduate schools offering that specialty, and 13th among both the public and private business schools. The 2012 rankings have not yet been released.