How teamwork shoved our way to becoming the national finalist of Global Management Challenge 2020- By Shivam Chugh from IIM Udaipur

Global Management Challenge - one of the largest strategy and management competitions hosts more than 6,50,000 university students and company managers across the world. The battle of management simulation in which each team runs a company, with the objective of getting the highest investment performance makes this challenge stand out. Being held in an international context, the experience of participating in this challenge was one of a kind. To throw more light on it, here is an anecdote from my journey of becoming the National finalist (top 8) of the Global Management Challenge 2020.

Division of labor among the team members was the most essential step during the journey of becoming the National finalist of the Global Management Challenge 2020. Each function was allotted to one person. Right from the first quarter, we started increasing the capacity aggressively knowing that it is a growing market. Instead of in-house capacity, we did a lot of outsourcing to save on capital investment. We created a dashboard in Excel which helped us make decisions quickly and efficiently.

However, understanding the competitor’s strategy was a challenge. How much to expand in the first quarter itself, demand prediction, how to price in the competitive market to get the maximum share and have the highest investment performance - every factor required careful analysis.

Forging our way as the finalists

The quality of the competition as well as the competitors was quite good. In fact, the simulation game was of international level and the judgment was fair at every step. 8 teams made it to the final. House of finance was the toughest of all and eventually, they won the finale as well. Their strategy of expanding too aggressively actually surprised us. Even though we tried to match them by expanding but the gap that they made at the start was too big to catch up. However, becoming the National finalist of the Global Management Challenge 2020 still gave us so much to cherish and learn!

This competition helped us to understand the importance of collaboration and teamwork apart from learning the art of decision making with limited information and time. The journey taught us to relate what impact each decision has on investment performance and understand the overall business acumen.

We prepared for the Global Management Challenge 2020 for 3 months and it was full of awesome moments. In the Semi-final round, we were continuously at the second or third position and not able to reach the top of the table. But after the 3rd quarter, we adopted a completely different strategy which helped us to get to the first place. This was really a special moment and we went to the finals because of this. Also, this is where competitions reflect the importance of a good team.

The power of five!

We were a 5-member team from the Global Supply Chain Management program with varied work experiences. This helped us to balance out the team and relate to all the aspects of the competition and perform well. There were situations where we had to manage conflicts. For this, we assigned a team leader amongst us and ensured that all the final decisions were taken by him. There were lots of discussions and brainstorming sessions before finally taking all the decisions and eventually everything happened with professional etiquettes.

Shivam Chugh: He was the Team Leader. Coming from a strong academic background with a PG from IIT Delhi and UG from NIT he has also got 4 years of professional experience with L&T. His ability to manage the team and take prompt decisions helped us to get through the various rounds of the competition.

Sudharshan R: He was given the responsibility of handling Operations. Having a strong experience of working in Supply chain and operations with a manufacturing firm, he was able to take decisions on out-sourcing and production requirements of the competition.

Meenaakshi Nair: She was given the responsibility of managing the finances of the company. Being a commerce post graduate and working as an auditor in one of the Big 4’s her command over the subject matter has enormously helped us in managing the finances effectively.

Ram Dixit: He was given the role of handling marketing decisions. Being an MBA in Marketing and having worked in various companies as a category manager, he was able to make the right decisions on pricing and advertising budgets.

Anmol Kapuria: He was given the responsibility of handling manpower and HR operations. Being from a construction background and having worked in an operations site, he was able to relate to the floor operations very well. This helped us in making decisions regarding employee wages, recruitment, and people development.

Check out other winning stories here:

Shivam Chugh - IIM Udaipur

2020-2021

With 4 years of professional experience and a UG and PG degree from NIT and IIT Delhi respectively, he has a knack of Supply Chain Management. His mettle and problem-solving skills has always paved his way to shine bright!