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RedPrairie congratulates winners of the Avnet Tech Games RedPrairie Supply Chain

07.03.2011

Vanderbilt students to receive $1,000 scholarships for demand planning and logistics strategy

RedPrairie Corporation, a productivity solutions provider, congratulated Vanderbilt University graduate students Derek Sparks, Francisco Pazos, Elisa Graban and Bryan Loughridge today as winners of the Avnet Tech Games RedPrairie Supply Chain Challenge. Conducted as an online virtual competition, student teams from colleges around the world managed a virtual supply chain involving manufacturing, distribution and forecasting from start to finish. The Red Prairie Supply Chain Challenege is one of several competitions held as part of the Avnet Tech Games, which is sponsored annually by global technology distributor Avnet, Inc.

When asked to discuss the team’s strategy for winning the contest, the four students – who all attend Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management – explained that effective inventory management was key in responding rapidly to an environment of constant and intense demand.

“When we got our first look at the environment in which we’d be operating, it was obvious that cash would be the biggest constraint,” Graban comments. “We realized that we needed to get inventory levels up as quickly as possible to make sure our manufacturing facility would never be idle. It was very similar to the kind of environment we see today as the world comes out of a recessionary climate.”

“Data analysis played the biggest part in reaching those levels,” adds Sparks. “We needed to make a number of complex decisions immediately, in order to identify the bottlenecks present in the scenario, and focus our efforts accordingly.”

“In the real world, we understand that making those kinds of decisions becomes a lot more efficient with the kind of technology RedPrairie offers,” Pazos concludes.

“RedPrairie sincerely congratulates all of the participants in this year’s RedPrairie Supply Chain Challenge,” says RedPrairie CEO Mike Mayoras. “We feel very strongly that the future of effective business is in the hands of students like them.”



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