A quartet of UTS students is the only Australian team mixing it with the world's best in the 2007 Global Business Case Competition hosted this month by Washington University in the USA.

Drawn from the faculties of Business, Engineering, Information Technology and Law, the UTS group will be pitting itself against 14 university undergraduate teams from North and South America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region in a high-pressure test of professional skills judged by top industry executives.

Coached by Professor Graeme Sheather from the Faculty of Business, double degree students Mark Collins (Engineering/Business), Sudave Singh (Business/IT), Trent Chan (Engineering/Business) and Janelle Moore (Business/Law) have been in training for two months ahead of the Washington showdown, which starts on 19 April.

Professor Sheather said UTS had been accepted for the competition after placing second out of 46 Australian and New Zealand universities in the National Boston Consulting Group Strategy Competition late last year. Mark, Sudave and Trent were members of that successful team.

"The Global Business Case Competition is a very intense experience," Professor Sheather said. "The teams are locked up for 48 hours to solve a global business problem facing a major multi-national corporation without any foreknowledge of what the problem will be.

"They must come out of the lockup with a Powerpoint presentation and printed executive summary to put before the judges in a 15-minute Q&A session.

"The best four teams then go into a shorter, even more intense, presentation to decide the winner.

"The cases are usually drawn from something significant in the global business environment from the previous year – Kosovan and Bosnian reconstruction projects last year – that involve a lot of data... a lot of financial information.

The students are expected to cover all the issues, like alternative energy, resource use and sustainability, political risks, staffing, training, supply chain management, government regulations and tariff barriers.

"It's a multi-discipline, multi-function test and we have a good spread of skills in the UTS team.

"Our training included a weekend lockup at a hotel last month where the students had to present to a group of Sydney CEOs and senior UTS academics."

Professor Sheather said Deloitte Growth Solutions, where Sudave works an analyst, is sponsoring two of the students to attend the competition and the other two, along with the team coach, are being sponsored by the Faculty of Business.

For more on the Global Business Case Competition visit http://bschool.washington.edu/gbc/.