The three business students spent a year running a cereal company.

They managed everything from marketing to how many blueberries to put in each box. In the end, the company was struggling through a recession, but it beat out its competitors.

The cereal company, however, was only ever a business simulation, and the year in which the students worked was actually condensed into only a few hours one day this summer.

But the glory of beating the competition was real.

University of Oklahoma students Thomas Kantowski, Thomas Ratliff and Jeremy Real won the third annual ERPsim international competition, a business simulation game using enterprise resource planning software.

Forty-one teams of three students participated from 20 universities worldwide, but none surpassed the work of OU's first entry into the competition.

The competition, hosted by HEC Montreal, required participants to operate a virtual business over four simulated quarters. The participants used an enterprise resource planning software, SAP R/3, that many real-life businesses use to handle their operations.

Students in the simulation competition operated the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, inventory, shipping and invoicing for Muesli Cereal Co. in Germany. The game moved quickly, with each quarter of the year taking only about 30 minutes.

"It was a very fast-paced thing," said Real, who graduated in May with his accounting bachelor's degree. "I guess about a minute per day. Once I got the hang of it, it was OK."

Economic conditions changed during each of the simulated quarters in the game, including a recession in quarter three.

"So we were freaking out, trying to get all the sales we could, but there's this recession," said Kantowski, management information systems graduate student. "And everyone's yelling at me to try to sell more. ... We ended up dropping a bunch of money into advertising and selling for absolutely nothing."

Despite the struggle during the recession, the OU team came out on top because they had the highest net income or profit out of all the teams.

The victory was all the more impressive because the young men weren't in the same location for the competition. Ratliff was the only one who could be in Norman for the competition. Real was in Seattle looking for a job and Kantowski was in Los Angeles.

The students communicated via Skype, an online video conferencing tool.

"What we would do is I would yell out at him that I needed stuff over Skype," said Kantowski, who took care of pricing the products in the simulation.

Not being in the same location could have been a challenge, but the students said it worked really well.

"It wasn't terribly difficult," Real said. "I expected it to cause more problems than it did."

The competition administrators didn't realize the team wasn't in the same location. Ratliff, who just graduated with his MBA and JD, said when the OU team won, the administrators had an awards ceremony broadcast online for all the participants to see from their remote locations. They cut to the Norman Webcast feed to talk to the team.

"He was like, 'Why don't you introduce your teammates,'" Ratliff said. "And I was like, 'I'm the only one here.' And they were like, 'That's even more impressive.'"

The team said they decided to participate in this competition for the fun of it. They learned how to use the ERP system in a class this past semester taught by Traci Carte, associate professor of MIS. They participated in a simulation and the team of Ratliff and Kantowski beat the rest of the class.

"It was so much fun," Ratliff said. "We would meet one or two times the day before ... and plan our strategy and how we were going to market and plan plant improvements."

Carte told them about the competition and they decided they'd like to give it a try.

"I was like, 'Really? Something as obscure and random as this, there's a competition?" Kantowski said.

They were teamed with another student during the class, but he had to go back to his home country of France for the summer. At the time, they didn't realize they could connect with each other remotely for the competition, so they enlisted the help of Real to join their team. He was on another team in the class, but performed the same role their departing team member had.

"He ended up doing a real bang-up job," Kantowski said. "So somehow we ended up qualifying and then we won."

Carte said the team did especially well in the competition considering that many of the other schools participating in the competition teach many classes on ERP.

"Our students had limited exposure to the simulation in one class," Carte said in a press release. "Their ability to compete so effectively says a lot about how smart these guys are, and it says a lot about the quality of the business education they are getting at Price College."

The OU students said they learned a lot from the competition.

"I definitely learned a lot about how you would manage the supply chain in a manufacturing business," Real said. He said he's added the competition to his resume, and prospective employers who know about the ERP system have been impressed.

"I think learning how to use the SAP, the ERP, was very much a real world experience," Ratliff said. He said it was extremely helpful, especially for anyone who wants to go into management.

Not to mention, the ERP itself is used by every Fortune 1,000 company, so just knowing how to use the product has made them more marketable, Kantowski said. He said some companies pay consultants hundreds of dollars an hour to operate the ERP system.

Ultimately, though, the young men participated in the event because it was a lot of fun. The team worked really well together.

"It's really really interesting the amount of communication that goes on, the amount of focus" during the competition, Kantowski said.

They said they hope OU teams continue participating in the competition. Kantowski will be the only one still a student next year though.

"We'd definitely like to compete next year and defend the title," he said.

Real said he would love to see OU students in future years continue competing.

"It's a really fun thing," he said. "I hope that some students pick it up next year, 'cause it's really fun."

Julianna Parker Jones 366-3541 jparker@normantranscript.com