Team Cows Go Mu – comprising Ryan Ng, Hua Bing Yong and Gerald Woo from the SUTD-SMU Dual Degree Programme in Technology and Management and Kelvin Tan from the National University of Singapore – was one of two grand prize winners at the inaugural Hack.Asia, a 48-hour hackathon organised by the Jardine Matheson Group and Daimler Group, with support from the Singapore Economic Development Board.
Themed “Shaping Asia’s Tomorrow”, the hackathon presented participants with six real-life business challenges in commerce and urban mobility to find innovative and data-driven solutions to shape Asia’s tomorrow.
800 applicants from 23 countries took part in the preliminary round, from which more than 120 students in 36 teams - representing the six best ideas from each of the six business challenges- were selected for the finals held at the Amazon Web Services office on 18 and 19 October 2019.
The finalist teams brainstormed and tested their ideas, worked with mentors, before pitching their proposals to a panel of judges made up of key executives from the Jardine Matheson Group and Daimler Group. The teams were judged on data methodology, creativity and originality, potential impact and feasibility of the solution.
Team Cows Go Mu took on the business challenge of “How can Dairy Farm improve the accuracy of inventory availability information so that customers have certainty the products ordered online are available and will be delivered as promised?”
The team used predictive analytics and machine learning to work on available data sets to forecast the availability of inventory. By ensuring Dairy Farm customers get what they want at the time they want it, customer satisfaction would be enhanced.
Gerald Woo said, “We decided to participate in this competition because the challenge was interesting and some of us have interests in e-commerce and supply chain. Working with real datasets from Dairy Farm, we had to deal with the uncertainty of data integrity while forming our solutions. We also had to work with a very limited set of data, both in terms of timespan and attributes. In order to produce meaningful results, we had to dig deep into the data. We made it a point to also present on these limitations and proposed possible extensions given more access. Through this competition, the team learned that it is important to understand customers’ needs and to suggest feasible solutions.”
As a grand prize winner, Team Cows Go Mu walked away with S$2500 and a sponsored trip to the Four Years From Now startup conference which will be held in February 2020 in Barcelona, Spain, where they will be showcasing their solutions to more than 30,000 international visitors, from venture capitalists, technology companies to start-ups.
Featured photo: Caption: Team Cows Go Mu, comprising Ryan Ng (SMU-SUTD), Hua Bing Yong (SMU-SUTD), Kelvin Tan (NUS) and Gerald Woo (SMU-SUTD), received their grand prize from Lim Kok Kiang (far left), Assistant Managing Director of Singapore Economic Development Board and Frieder Munk (far right), Corporate Strategy Manager at DigitalLife@Daimler, at the finals of Hack.Asia. [Photo: Jardine Matheson]
