APICS - Southwest District - District Meeting

40 students from 7 different schools competed as 9 teams in the 2nd Annual Student Case Competition hosted by the Southwest District of APICS during the April 11-12, 2008 district meeting in Buena Park, CA. The first and second place winners were a team from UNLV and a combined team from Cal State East Bay and Cal State-Chico, respectively. The winning students will travel in September to Kansas City to the APICS International Conference and Expo, where they will again compete against the winning teams from the Midwest and East Coast case competitions.

All the students did very well under tremendous pressure – they had about 15 hours to work on the Case study. Each team had to write a 3 page paper and create a 6-minute PowerPoint presentation. Then, they presented their solutions orally to the chapter leaders of the Southwest district APICS chapters where they were judged by 3 oral judges, while their papers were judged by 3 written judges. Only 1 point separated the 1st and 2nd place teams.

Other schools represented were Arizona State, Boise State, 2 teams from Cal State University-Northridge, and 2 teams from Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, the school whose team won the International Case Competition in 2007. The 2007 winners were present to assist district staff with this competition.

Congratulations to all the students who competed! You are a credit to your schools and will make wonderful Operations Management professionals very soon! Our 2009 3rd Annual Student Case Competition is currently slated for Feb. 5-6, 2009 in the Los Angeles area. More information soon!

The growth in this program has been phenomenal over the last 2 years. In the first year, we had 9 students from 3 schools competing on 2 teams. The growth this year to 40 students can be directly attributed to the efforts made by the District to reach out to Operations Management professors at schools within and outside the Southwest District area. To learn more about how the Southwest District put on this successful event, contact Barry Solomon, Director of Student Development at solombar@cox.net or Ellen Kane, Executive Council at: ek@theacagroup.com.

Names of the 1st place team members from UNLV are:
Cole Shinn
Denis Khantimirov
Joe Pignatiello
Nate Curtis
Shaena Friedman

Names of the 2nd place team members and their schools are:

Christina Tsao CSU-Chico
Gina Garitson CSU-E/Bay
Merrill Crowl CSU-Chico

There are 2 links to photos from the event. The first link shows the photos of each team as they were taken immediately following their presentations. The 2nd link shows 2 albums of candid photos from the event. Both are on Walgreen’s photo site and you do need to create a user ID to see them. But you can opt out of their advertising. Feel free to download any of the photos you like for your personal use.

Link to album of teams after their oral presentations: Click here
Link to photos taken by Darlene Morris (2 albums): Click here