BS Best B-School Awards: Solving real business problems key to success

The top award went to a project on supply chain optimisation by Amrutha Bhamidimukkula, a final-year student at Vinod Gupta School of Management,IIT, Kharagpur, for Domino's Pizza

Projects that helped bring about supply chain optimisation for a fast food chain, devised a psychometric tool for selection of sales officers and developed a tool for optimising the performance of digital advertising campaigns emerged winners at the Business Standard Best B-School Project Award 2017.

The top award went to a project on supply chain optimisation by Amrutha Bhamidimukkula, a final-year student at Vinod Gupta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, for Domino’s Pizza. Bhamidimukkula worked on the project for Jubilant FoodWorks where she helped reduce the frequency of orders from the outlets to the Domino’s supply chain centre. One of the solutions she suggested was that the outlets segregate their orders as ‘dry’ and “chilled” items. The project 

helped come up with a more efficient order-placing and transportation system for Domino’s Pizza.

Mohit Aggarwal of XLRI, Jamshedpur, won the second prize. His project was to develop a psychometric tool for recruitment of sales officers at ICICI Bank. The tool helps minimise interviewee response biases and thereby improves the selection process for the bank.

Dhaval Patel of K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research, Mumbai, came in at third position. His project looked at performance optimisation for digital advertising campaigns. He developed a tool that would help do that for the Mumbai-based digital marketing firm Performics Convonix, a part of the Publicis Groupe. 
 

The tenth edition of the awards saw a power-packed jury select the winners based on presentations made by five shortlisted candidates. 

“All the projects presented tell the real problems businesses are facing today in India. These projects had meticulous methodology and all provided some practical conclusions that made me extremely happy,” said Ajit Balakrishnan, founder & CEO, Rediff.com, and the chairman of the jury. 

Bhamidimukkula said, “This being such a competitive event, I did not have much hope, though for two months I was busy preparing for it. It was a very transparent process from the beginning where the judging criteria were well explained.” 

Aggarwal, who came second, said, “The selection process was very objective. The jury was really of a high standard and it was a valuable opportunity to interact with them.” He found that they asked him questions that challenged him to think beyond what he had thought of for the project. 

Patel, who was in third place, said, “It is a huge stage which gives us an opportunity to evaluate ourselves with other top B–School projects. It gave a fair chance to all of us.”

Business Standard received 142 projects for evaluation in 2017, from which five were selected for the final round. Among the projects awarded consolation prizes were: 

One that looked at the viability of the Rewa ultra mega solar power project, by Gaurav Jain of IMT Ghaziabad and; another, a SWOT analysis of Mahindra & Mahindra’s Gramveer network and a proposition for merging it with the company’s Mahindra Mitra programme, by Pranav Rao of Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship, Bangalore.