The winner of GM Xperience 2017 was the team from FGV’s Sao Paulo School of Business Administration (EAESP), formed by Professor Alexandre Pignanelli and students Giovanna Bragagnolo, Gustavo Forti, Sofia Cunha, and William Sun. After winning the Brazilian phase, the EAESP team will now move on to the global phase of the competition at the corporation’s head office in Detroit, USA.

“The students worked very hard to represent EAESP at GM Xperience. We started receiving information about the case in early June, and the team worked really hard to solve the case over the following two months, also working through the mid-year recess. As we advanced to the final phase, the students had a unique learning experience in an actual corporate environment, searching for solutions to GM’s issues, making and standing by high-level decisions, working with GM executives and several suppliers, and planning and providing presentations to this audience, among several other tasks,” said the professor.  

The competition had a phase performed at Sindipeças, in Sao Paulo, and another at the General Motors do Brasil factory, in Sao Caetano do Sul. Initially, GM had each team solve a global sourcing case regarding components of autonomous vehicles, currently under development by the automaker. In the final phase, a new surprise case (continuing the previous case) was proposed and developed on the same day. All cases were based around logistics and supply chain management elements, in addition to requiring the application of knowledge from other administration areas.

“We tried to explore one of the strengths of our undergraduate course, which is the balanced knowledge between quantitative and qualitative aspects in business management. On the technical side, we developed a highly sophisticated mathematical model to support the decisions proposed by the team; on the other side, we focused a lot on strategic issues. I believe this approach was crucial for EAESP’s victory, allowing us to stand out among other engineering schools – which were the majority of participants – and other business schools,” he said.

GM Xperience is a global project held by GM in multiple countries where the automaker operates. The project is organized by the GPSC - Global Purchasing & Supply Chain area. In Brazil, 15 universities were invited by GM to join the Xperience 2017.  The global phase will be held in September, featuring 25 universities from across the globe, besides U.S. institutions.

“It’s definitely a much greater challenge, but I’m confident that the team will be even more dedicated. Our students are very motivated and have already started preparing. We should receive the global phase’s case over the next few days, which we believe will be somehow related to the cases we’ve worked on so far. So, we will resume the work that was a huge success during the Brazilian phase”, said Alexandre.