o9 Solutions Supports the MIT Global SCALE Network Supply Chain Challenge and Awards Winners for Second Consecutive Year

The importance of data-driven planning and decision-making is increasingly recognized as a key lever for improving outcomes for both businesses and the planet. At the same time, businesses today face supply chain challenges of growing number and complexity. 

In order to prepare current and future supply chain and business leaders to tackle those challenges, the MIT Global SCALE Network and the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) hosted their annual Supply Chain Challenge in the first few weeks of 2023. The challenge is a three-week competition, which presents learners with real company data and an underlying supply chain problem for participants to solve. 

The MIT Global SCALE Network is a global alliance of leading research and education centers dedicated to supply chain and logistics excellence through innovation. One hundred forty students from the SCALE Centers in Spain, Luxembourg, Malaysia, China, and more convened in Cambridge to network and learn from supply chain experts and participate in the Supply Chain Challenge.  

Six company partners, including o9 Solutions, supported the competition by providing real company data sets containing a supply chain problem that needed to be resolved. o9 Solutions provided access to our Market Intelligence knowledge offering comprising data feeds curated for relevance to supply chain planning. By working collaboratively on real supply chain challenges, each team could develop and showcase superior analytical skills and mastery of analytical tools (Python, Optimization, PowerBI, etc.) by solving real-world problems. A dedicated MIT postdoctoral researcher mentored each team. 

A jury of renowned business and supply chain leaders and researchers evaluated the teams’ solutions and presentations. Seven teams out of the 28 were selected to present during the final. The solutions presented were assessed for supply chain innovation, applicability, and business acumen. 

o9 Solutions is pleased to have supported the competition by providing the awards fund for the 15 students in the winning teams!  The first prize was awarded to the team of Julia Fernandez del Valle, Gianmarco Merino, Gustavo Rodrigues, Yumna Tajwar, and Khaled Eid! 

Vikram Murthi, VP of Industry Strategy at o9, Valentina Anzola, MIT alumna and Sustainable Solutions Lead at o9, and Lauren Clover, North America Recruitment Lead, attended the outstanding presentations. Vikram Murthi handed the awards to the winning teams on behalf of o9. 
Congratulations to everyone who participated in and supported the annual MIT SCALE Network Supply Chain Challenge, and special thanks to the MIT Global SCALE Network and the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) for organizing the event and hosting us!

About the author

o9 Solutions

The Digital Brain Platform

o9 offers a leading AI-powered Planning, Analytics & Data platform called the Digital Brain that helps companies across industry verticals transform traditionally slow and siloed planning into smart, integrated and intelligent planning and decision making across the core supply chain, commercial and P&L functions. With o9’s Digital Brain platform, companies are able to achieve game-changing improvements in quality of data, ability to detect demand and supply risks and opportunities earlier, forecast demand more accurately, evaluate what-if scenarios in real time, match demand and supply intelligently and drive alignment and collaboration across customers, internal stakeholders and suppliers around the integrated supply chain and commercial plans and decisions. Supported by a global ecosystem of partners, o9’s innovative delivery methodology helps companies achieve quick impact in customer service, inventory levels, resource utilization, as well as ESG and financial KPIs—while enabling a long-term, sustainable transformation of their end-to-end planning and decision-making capabilities.