Three students from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering received second place honors in the 2008 **" 2009 Material Handling Student Design Competition sponsored by the College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE) and Keogh Consulting.

The team comprised ISyE seniors Natasha Jain and Matt Knepper, as well as visiting graduate student Chang Peng Shen. Chen Zhou, associate professor and associate chair for undergraduate studies, advised the student team. The team shares the second place prize of $1000, with an additional $500 prize going to the Stewart School.

Each year, the Material Handling Student Design Competition provides student teams with the opportunity to design a manufacturing or distribution facility to support the objectives of a fictional company (case content is drawn from real-world implementations). This year's case study focused on a facility design project assigned to the engineering team of the fictional Dollar Value Supplies (DV$), a major wholesale Third Party Logistics (3PL) company. DV$ is challenged with the goal of designing a distribution center to service new business by utilizing an existing facility that is ready for final fit-out by the builder/developer. The information contained in this case study has been developed to provide students with a real-world situation in regards to designing a functional and efficient distribution center layout and understanding the 3PL business.

Three academic and three industry judges evaluated the entries according to the criteria of product flow, equipment utilization, space utilization, operational plan, overall integration, and economic justification. Additionally, the judges were asked to evaluate writing quality, analysis and presentation.

The judges cited the ISyE team for the "thoroughness of its report, depth of the analysis, and excellence of the results."

CICMHE sponsors the annual material handling student design competition for teams of students interested in the analysis and design of material handling systems. Since the first design competition was offered during the 1994-1995 academic year, student design teams have developed material handling system designs for a variety of manufacturing and warehousing operations. Design problems are typically drawn from the case files of designers and manufacturers of material handling equipment and their end users.