Teams who want to go for the extra mile and benchmark their Value Chain Management skills against the best in the world can join the yearly The Fresh Connection Global PRO Challenge. Here teams from across the globe compete against each other. Only the best progress to the Global Final where they battle for the World Champion title of Supply Chain Management and an Executive Education SCM course at MIT in Cambridge, MA, USA, worth $5,995 per participant!
All editions of the Challenge have a supply chain focus theme. Some themes from recent years are: Constrained Capacity, Carbon Footprint, Strategic and Functional Alignment (S&OP) or Supply Chain Resilience.
Numerous challenges wait for the participants, which require more than just specialist knowledge. The Boehringer Ingelheim and Doka teams also had this experience when they took part in the 2021 final: "One of the most important findings was to see the importance of cooperation – not only in this game, but also in all the topics we deal with on a daily basis. No matter what challenge we approach, we need to look at it from an end-to-end perspective. Cross-functional collaboration is the only way we can succeed in the end," says Team Boehringer.
But participating in the challenge still offers completely different highlights, as Team Doka also found: "I really liked the competitive character, especially the heated discussions within our team. I liked the dynamics of the game and the continuous difficulties that are comparable to real live problems." And although the participants and teams would have liked to meet physically for an exchange, Team Doka appreciated the possibility of remote participation via the virtual reality platform virBela. This made it possible for the team to recreate reality despite the physical distance: "The environment of virBela was a good environment to meet the other team members and talk to other teams."
For Team Boehringer and Team Doka, it was not enough to win in the end, but the teams still take a lot with them and can gain a lot of good from the business simulation game The Fresh Connection. "It was really intriguing to see how things interact with each other. I liked being able to see the results of our decisions quickly from one day to the next," says Team Boehringer. "We like the idea of learning while playing. There was a positive spirit involved."
