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More valuable to students than a new tablet computer or a smart phone, the opportunity of an internship with a management engineering company is a prize that nearly a hundred UWA students competed for last month.

The company, Visagio , ran a week-long challenge on the Crawley campus, in partnership with UWA Young Engineers (UWAYE) and the UWA Consulting Society (UWACS), in which Engineering students worked in teams of three to devise and deliver business solutions.

The winning two teams, Micro-Einsteins (Shreya Gupta, Priyam Khare, and Mytreye Manikyam), and runners up Co-Creation (Dawson Demassiet-Huning, Joel Humphreys, and Julia Li) won interviews with Visagio. (The Micro-Einsteins also won an iPad mini each.)

The interviews are for internships. They won the chance to skip the regular recruiting process, and proceed direct to the final interview phase.

The challenge started with the students playing a supply chain game.

Four teams joined together to form a 'supply chain', where each team represented a link in the chain (for example, the retailer, wholesaler, distributor or factory). The game lasted for 52 rounds, where each round represented a calendar week. The teams had to make decisions on how much product they would order and deliver each week, depending on the ordered quantity they would receive from their adjacent links.

Volunteers from UWAYE and UWACS acted as the 'customer' and the 'manufacturer' on either end of each supply chain, where for each round, the customer would send a new demand to the retailer, and the manufacturer would deliver the product to the factory. The ultimate goal of the game was for each link to minimise the amount of inventory and backorder costs, without being able to communicate with the other links in the supply chain to foresee the demand that would be coming.

The students then received the data from this game, and had to identity the problems in the supply chain, and propose solutions to optimise it. For instance, students had to recognise lack of communication throughout the supply chain and lack of visibility of demand forecasting.

To solve these problems and reduce overall costs, strategies such as implementing systems or tools to allow for real-time sharing of information across all links of the supply chain may have been proposed.

During the week-long Challenge, students had the opportunity to book a consultation session with a Visagio representative to provide some guidance or direction for their report. After the competition closed, students also had an opportunity to request feedback over the phone with a Visagio representative.

The  maximum 96 students took part with more than 30 on the waiting list.