Amazon India announces the winners of the 10th edition of Amazon Customer Excellence (ACE) Challenge 2020
Bangalore: Amazon India today announced the winners of the 10th Edition of Amazon Customer Excellence (ACE) Challenge 2020, an annual Business School Case Study Competition. Over 12,500 students registered for the challenge that was organized as a virtual event for the first time this year. ACE Challenge 2020 focused on the theme of ‘Innovate, Strategize, Build’ for the case study titled ‘Digitizing Indian MSME – Key to Atmanirbhar Bharat’ – ways to make Amazon as the go-to-marketplace for MSMEs to sell online. The winning team Lakshaya from IIM, Lucknow walked away with cash awards worth INR 2,00,000, while the first runner-up Team Kaizen from IIM, Ahmedabad was awarded INR 1,50,000 and the second runner-up Prometheus from SP Jain, Mumbai received INR 50,000. The winning team, first and second runners-up were also selected for pre-placement interviews and Amazon rewards.
“We are excited to conclude the 10th Edition of ACE Challenge, which is also our first virtual edition, where bright and innovative minds from over top B-Schools came together to create workable and inspiring solutions to real-life challenges. The 10th edition of ACE challenge 2020 saw over 40% YoY growth in participation from campuses, with a 49% YoY increase in diversity representation,” said Raj Kaza, Director, Talent Acquisition, APAC & India. “ACE Challenge is part of our campus strategy to go beyond just hiring from campuses and to continue engaging with them. This year, given the COVID-19 situation, the ways of working may have changed around us, but our commitment to provide a great learning experience remains the same. We are confident that ACE Challenge, like our other campus programs, will help us to identify talent and prepare them to become future leaders,” added Kaza.
ACE Challenge 2020 was launched on 10th August with a virtual fireside chat on Twitch with senior leaders from Amazon and national finalists from ACE 2019. The event gave students an overview of Amazon’s peculiar culture and tips on how to ace the challenge. This was followed by individual campus rounds across 12 core campuses and a combined event for 9 wild card campuses. Top 10 teams from each core campus along with a winning team from wildcard campuses, presented phase one of the case studies to a panel of Amazon business leaders, which shortlisted top 13 finalist teams to present their solutions to Amazon leaders in the finale round.
The opening ceremony of the finale was live streamed on Twitch. The finale judges included Raghava Rao (VP, Finance and CFO Amazon.in), Deepti Varma (Director, HR, APAC and MENA), Sandeep Thangiah (Director, Transport Execution, Amazon Logistics), Manjari Upadhye (Director, Category Management), Abhijit Kamra (Director, Global Selling), Vaishali Kasture (Head of Strategic Projects, AWS), Puneesh Kumar (Director, Alexa India) and Sumeet Swapnil (Case Writer and Program Leader, Global Channel Sales).
Amazon Customer Excellence (ACE) Challenge was first launched in 2011 as part of Amazon’s vision to encourage innovation and identify the business leaders of tomorrow who devised innovative solutions for real-life complex business challenges.