A team of four UConn MBA students were awarded First Place and Grand Champions in the APICS Northeast Business Case Competition in Albany, N.Y., last month. This is the fourth time that a UConn MBA team has been awarded top honors.

The winning team members are first-year MBA students Jason Harris, Akhilesh Kumar, Jared Siraco, and Yogendra Bhosrekar. As a result of the win, the team will next compete in the Global APICS Competition which will be held in Las Vegas in October. 

“We are up against 28 teams from the Northeast, so not only the number of teams in competition was high, but also the intensity was high, as most of them were very motivated and determined to give their best,” Kumar said.

Undergraduate and MBA students from schools including University of Massachusetts, Maine Maritime Academy, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rutgers University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute participated. 

The competition was based on supply chain, operations, strategy and management, said Meg Warren, interim director of the Full-time MBA Program at UConn. The School of Business fielded three teams.

“Everyone on our team had their own distinct strengths that helped us achieve our goal,” Harris said. “Together, we were a very well-rounded group. It was our out-of-the-box thinking and the comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analyses that followed which really set us apart.”

“Winning is obviously a good feeling, but this was a special win because of team effort and because UConn is continuing its winning streak for the fourth time,” Bhosrekar said. “It gave us more confidence in approaching business challenges and strategies.”

APICS is a leading professional association for supply chain and operations management.