Three MSc students - Anqi Wang, Ying Zhou and Jun Cheng from Birmingham Business School have won the National Contest on Reverse Logistics Design, held in Shanghai University in China. The competition, organised by Operations Research Society of China, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and Shanghai Logistics Association, had attracted over 320 university teams around the world to participate this year, including top universities such as National University Singapore, Shanghai Jiaotong University, UTBS France and Tongji University.
The Birmingham team developed a project on “An optimised design for pharmaceutical reverse logistics system” to compare the best practices in the UK, France and USA, and proposed an optimisation model for the pharma reverse logistics system, which was supervised by Dr Kurt Liu, from the Department of Management.
After having successfully gone through the first and second stages of the competition, the team had won a place in the final to compete against other 39 top teams in Shanghai. In the final, the team gave a compelling presentation and became the favourite project of the judging panel, beating NUS, UTBS, SJTU and Tongji University, etc. to claim the 1st place. Dr Liu also received the best supervisor award in the competition.
“Their performance is truly exceptional. I’m really proud of them for winning the competition. This is a great experience for the students, which also means a lot for their future careers. The team have made an excellent representation of Birmingham University in this event, and shown how great our Birmingham students are when competing against other top university students”, said Dr Liu.
Anqi Wang, Ying Zhou, and Jun Cheng are currently studying in the MSc International Business programme at Birmingham Business School.