A student academic team from one of Georgia Highlands College’s (GHC) bachelor’s programs is ready to compete this weekend in the national Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) Case Competition set for Feb. 20.

Students in GHC’s Logistics and Supply Chain Management program have been given the opportunity to test their supply chain knowledge and use their critical thinking and problem-solving skills to work on real-world challenges, said Assistant Professor for Logistics and Supply Chain Management Lucinda Montgomery.

The 2021 ASCM Case Competition is provided by ASCM in collaboration with Deloitte Consulting LLP. Participating teams present solutions to an exciting end-to-end supply chain management problem as they compete for prize money and recognition. The case may involve distribution, logistics, sales and operations planning, inventory, and other operations management challenges.

Seven teams from GHC competed in the “College and University Round” of the national competition in October 2020. From that group of seven GHC teams, two entered into the “Virtual Qualifying Round” in November 2020. Of those two GHC teams that entered into the “Virtual Qualifying Round,” one team, led by student Stephen Harmon, is advancing to the “Southeast Regional Round” on Feb. 20, 2021. If that team is successful at the “Regional Round,” they will go on to compete in the “Final Competition” in October 2021.

“Students were presented with a case, data exhibits, a PowerPoint template and judging rubric. For this particular case, students had to answer three questions and scenarios pertaining to COVID-19 and the impact on supply chains,” Montgomery said. “GHC’s team is in the Top 8 in our region, and out of over 300 participating colleges and universities, GHC is ranked in the Top 64 overall.”

Students on the team are Stephen Harmon and Raul Madrid of Cartersville, along with Krystal Ellis of Acworth and Trent Mull of Rome. Students are enrolled at the Cartersville site and take classes remotely.

“The members of our team were surprised and excited to learn we would go on to compete in the regional round,” Harmon said. “We had put in a considerable amount of time outside of normal school hours to put our presentation together. I could not be any prouder of my team and team members for the effort that they put into the ASCM case competition.”

Harmon said he and his team feel their classes helped prepare them for the competition, which in turn provided an opportunity to engage in some of the workplace scenarios that graduates of the Logistics and Supply Chain Management program may encounter.

“The course material from our first week in the BBA program through the present is highly applicable to the ASCM case competition,” Harmon said. “It also helped that the BBA program at GHC is not simply textbook learning. There are a lot of hands-on assignments and projects to apply the textbook learning to real-world current issues and situations.”