September 27, 2005
We Know Furniture Wins 2005 MBA International Business and Communications Case Challenge

We Know Furniture, a team of four first-year MBA students, took first place Sept. 22-23 at the 2005 MBA International Business and Communications Case Challenge, the annual case competition hosted by the Hispanic Graduate Business Association (HGBA) at the McCombs School of Business.

The international team We Know Furniture won $1,500 and included Ramon Castro of Peru, Iris Chen of China, Johanna Luttrell of Panama, and Nicholas Rojeski of the United States. Simply Solutions took second place and $1,000, and Guanxi placed third, winning $500.

Overall, 17 teams of first-year McCombs MBA students competed in the event sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, the McCombs Plus Program, and the student organization HGBA.

The case-based competition recreates a real-world international business situation in which teams must offer solutions that take cultural and business practices into account. This year’s case competition focused on dealing with a furniture company’s limited manufacturing abilities in China and whether or how the company should expand its number of product lines.

The case provides an abundant amount of information about an actual Canadian furniture company and the possible real problems it faced while involved in international business relations a couple of years ago.

“It’s about deciphering what is important and what’s not,” said Nicholas Rojeski, a We Know Furniture team member.

Teammate Iris Chen explained the most difficult part of the competition was to not panic under the time crunch and to determine the primary dilemmas.

“At first we didn’t have the numbers, so we got hung up on that and lost the big picture,” Chen said.

Later, the team decided to simply make financial assumptions and move on to the next situation.

Judge Christy Laurdisen said she thought the caliber of the students was clearly high.

“I was impressed with how well the students presented their cases, especially after being back in school for only one month,” said Lauridsen, IBM advisory software engineer and Extreme Blue Technical staff member.

Employees from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Dell Computers, and IBM, as well as McCombs faculty members and communication coaches judged the competition.

This successful event was coordinated by Jorge Caridad, HGBA president and MBA ’06; Enrique Villasenor, HGBA VP of special events and MBA ’06; Saleem Assaf, Director of the Plus Program; and this year's additional HGBA officers.