SPbPU Students Take Part in the Global Final Week of the 2018 Global Student Challenge - The Fresh Connection

If something does not come out after the first attempt, don’t give up: just keep trying, go on with your efforts, and the success will not be long in coming! And these are more than just words: the third attempt of Polytechnic students to take part in the global student challenge - The Fresh Connection became their let pass to the Global Final Week. Second-year students of the “International Business Development” Master’s degree program taught in English (Institute of Business Management, Economics, and Trade) Sergey SMIRNOV, Tatyana PRIBYLOVA, Khristina TERYOKHINA, and Vasantan Deva INBARAGES joined the 30 best teams from across the globe and in the end of April they will go to the City of Zwolle (the Netherlands) to take part in the final and most difficult stage of the challenge and compete for the major prize of euro 10 thousand.

The Fresh Connection is world’s best web-based business simulation. This training tool provides real-life insight in the complexities and interdependencies of supply chains operating under uncertain and volatile market conditions (Supply Chain Management; Ed. note). By the Challenge conditions, the participants are offered a company that is suffering severe losses, and a new management team has been appointed to make the company profitable again by making strategic and tactical decisions. The team should try to reach the best possible ROI (Return on Investment; Ed. note) indexes. Conditions of the Challenge are getting more and more complicated with each round: the number of parameters to control is getting bigger and bigger.

“Each team has four members, and each one has his/her own role,” D.A. GAVRILOV, Higher School of Business Management and Economy told. “On the one hand, each person is responsible for the analysis of a particular aspect of the organization’s activities; however, group discussion and team decision-making would be an asset. Another interesting point is that Polytechnic University is the only university in Russia where this business simulation is used for teaching students of the Master and Bachelor’s degree programs.”

Within the frame of the educational process, SPbPU students pass six rounds of the business simulation; the most complex configuration consists of 12 rounds. The International Student Challenge - The Fresh Connection is divided into three stages: qualification, continental, and global. In 2018, about 10 thousand students from all over the world have taken part in the Challenge. This means that the SPbPU students were shortlisted among the 30 best of 2.5 thousand teams, and this is a prominent achievement on its own. Besides a very intricate contest task, participants of the Global Final Challenge will take part in a diverse program: they will visit various organizations and enterprises in the Netherlands and meet the companies’ CEOs.

Despite the fact that Russia yet has no generic name for the profession connected with chain supply management, its popularity is growing rapidly. Each year, the number of students willing to get education in this sphere goes up. One can learn the chain supply management at SPbPU in the Master’s degree program of International business development taught in English IBME&T and in the Master’s degree program of the Institute of Advanced Production Technologies. This kind of business simulation is taking place at SPbPU under the frames of standard educational courses for about 100 students of both directions. Besides this, by way of experiment, the business simulation of the Fresh Connection was also organized in this term for the Bachelor’s degree students of the “International Logistics” program at IBME&T.

“This is a great achievement to be a part of the Global Final along with the best teams from all over the world, and our students have been heading to that steadily and purposefully. This is a major success by itself, and a good reason to be proud of it for the University as a whole. I wish the team a success in the final stage of the Challenge with all my heart,” D.A. GAVRILOV concluded.