An interdisciplinary team of students from Prairie View A&M University took home the top prize in Phillips 66’s (P66) Black Employee Network (BEN) Case Competition.
“This year’s case challenged teams to analyze various means to transport fuel from Phillips 66’s Houston facility to its New Orleans facility, a real-life scenario,” said PVAMU College of Business Instructor Clyde McNeil.
PVAMU’s winning team was Amber Diehl (senior accounting major), Dannick Boyogueno (senior marketing major), Asia Brown (junior accounting major), Brandyn Smith (junior finance major), and Amber Felder (sophomore computer science major). They built a cost profit model that not only took into consideration labor and storage costs constraints but also weather patterns and the cost of safety and environmental remediation. The Prairie View team generated a solution that successfully resonated with the judges.
“They supported their solution with effective quantitative and qualitative analysis in addition to successfully getting through an intense Q&A with a panel of recruiters and management,” expressed McNeil.
For the past three years, P66 has hosted the BEN competition during its university recruitment season. The goal is to showcase the talent developed at HBCU’s and create more career opportunities for local HBCU students. Additionally, the event is designed to recruit business, engineering and technology students for the company’s summer internship program and full-time opportunities.
“Having observed this event for the last three years, I would say the measure in which we evaluate this opportunity is not in who wins and losses, but more so in the opportunities afforded to students,” said McNeil.