MBA: Smooth Operations in Paris

SDA Bocconi School of Management placed two students in each of the teams that got the first three positions at the 'Pioneer without Fear' HEC Amazon MBA Case Competition, held in HEC Paris Jouy en Josas campus on 18-20 March.

One hundred students from 12 European MBAs – fifteen of them from SDA Bocconi – were called to Paris to discuss two operations based business cases concerning Amazon warehouses (the fulfillment centers). Amazon managers and academic mentors (Giuseppe Stabilini, SDA Professor of Operations and Technology Management, among them) counseled the students. "The first case was about temporary workers recruitment, an important issue for a company like Amazon, with an activity peak around Christmas; the second about motivation and human resource management in a warehouse", Prof. Stabilini says, "and students, divided into five-person mixed teams, with people from different business schools, had to choose which case to tackle".

"It's been a great experience", says Leonardo Tedioli, an MBA student and member of the third-placed team . "We had to get to know each other and start working in a very short time. My team worked on the presentation from 2pm on Saturday to 4am on Sunday. Then we presented our work with a 10' pitch on Sunday morning. The top 5 teams had to present it again, but in 20 minutes, in the afternoon".

SDA Bocconi students in the first-placed team were Leonardo Machado and Aravind Gurumurthi; in the second-placed team Emiliano Rossi and Luca Bellisomo; in the third team Leonardo Tedioli and Luca Maisto.

All of them, along with their teammates from other business schools, enter the final phase of Amazon's Pathway program, a program of talent recruiting, and will have job interviews with Amazon managers in the next days.