APICS Case Competition
On February 19-20 APICS hosted a case competition near Chicago, Illinois. This was a phenomenal experience, as I learned a great amount about the APICS community, did some excellent networking and had a TON of fun doing it. A case competition for APICS consists of a group of professionals come up with a scenario and teams of up to eight find solutions to it. This year’s competition was based heavily on the Theory of Constraints, which if you read The Goal; you were very well prepared for.
It starts by you checking into your hotel, this year was a Double Tree, and get situated into your room. After that it is strictly professional, as you are required to wear at least business casual at all times. You then attend a roughly 2 hour meeting which consists of a discussion of what chapters are doing well and poorly, and how to fix the issued faced. There were teams from as far away as Houston, Texas!!! Also at the end they give you the case, roughly 9PM. After that it is time for food. Here is where I thought there was an extreme bottleneck and should probably be looked at in the future. They had food in 2 rooms for about 120 people and they have you enter and exit in the same door. Now as far as streamlining goes, this was silly as you are trying to over utilize an area that was designed for one person at a time, and if a line formed, people were nearly trapped inside.
Finally rested enough, uploaded all the pictures and got my work together that I can blog about this wonderful trip!
Sorry it’s been so long since my last update. School at Clarkson University is ramping up. We just got off a long weekend break followed by the APICS international conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This event in Toronto was an amazing time to learn more about the industry and meet new people. Of which I happily did both.
The first APICS conference that I was able to attend was in Massachusetts. This was a regional conference so there were people from all around the area. I was able to meet people from across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the entire Northeast. There were some very smart people there who had the capabilities of running companies, and some who were. There were people who had all the APICS certifications. Some people had doctorate while others had barely finished high school. And the one thing in common was their participation to APICS. Being a president of a local chapter or even participating in a local chapter is all done of the person free will, no one gets paid to be there.