February 9, 2026
Intertwining technology and business is a winning strategy, one that this year’s KPMG Cup Showcase winning team knows well.
The KPMG Cup Showcase is the culminating activity in the Consulting Field Project (BIND 2024) course, a graduate elective in the School of Business taught by Clinical Associate Professor of Business Administration Tom Davis. The event is generously underwritten by KPMG’s Pittsburgh Office and gives each student consulting team the opportunity to present its work to a panel of consulting industry judges who determine the overall winning team from all of the student consulting team projects that term. Varun Shelke, a master’s student studying information science at SCI, was part of a team with four Pitt Business graduate students who took home first place in the Fall 2025 KPMG Cup Showcase.
For Shelke, one big outcome of participating in the KPMC Cup Showcase is that he’s seen how technology and business are not separate worlds.
“The future belongs to hybrid thinkers who can evaluate technology through a business lens and inform business strategy with technical understanding,” Shelke said. “Neither perspective alone reaches optimal decisions. Rather, our winning project recommendation succeeded precisely because we evaluated the client's market opportunity through the lens of both technical feasibility and business value simultaneously.”
Shelke’s team was led by Pitt Business MBA student Sarah Peabody and also included Pitt Business master's students Michael Chirumbolo, Christina Vlachos and MBA exchange student from the University of Augsburg (Germany) Anna Kvitka. Davis had sourced a project for the team from PPG Industries (a corporate partner of both SCI and Pitt Business), and the course provided the scaffolding for the student team to develop and apply management consulting practices to the engagement with support from their faculty advisor and executive coach.
“[The] combination of regular touchpoints, leveraging individual strengths, and iterative refinement allowed us to deliver comprehensive recommendations that earned first place at the KPMG Cup Showcase,” Shelke said.
Davis had formed each student consulting team prior to the start of the term via a comprehensive process taking into account each student’s background, strengths, and skillsets. Because the course enrolls only a small number of non-business students, Shelke’s unique SCI skillset was in short supply.
“My technical background in software engineering, combined with experience working with enterprise clients, made me a strong fit for PPG's strategic technology and market analysis challenge,” Shelke said.
The structure and interdisciplinary work of the Consulting Field Project course creates an invaluable opportunity for students who aspire to careers in business, technology, or management consulting. Davis adds that the Pitt Business 2030 strategic plan includes a pillar around the role of business in digital transformation, making this partnership very intentional.
“Advancing these kinds of interdisciplinary partnerships between SCI and Pitt Business not only provides unique opportunities for SCI students but also helps to better prepare business students to work effectively on the kinds of cross-functional teams they will be part of in their careers,” Davis said.
Shelke and his teammates used their cross-disciplinary skills to great effect, dividing tasks based on expertise. Shelke worked on the quantitative analytics and technical analysis duties which were a vital part of effort while his teammates took on tasks around the financial, marketing, and supply chain aspects of the project.
During the team’s final presentation, the PPG Industries’ executives in the audience confirmed that they planned to use the research and data from the student consulting team’s project to inform their future decision-making process.
That represented a win-win-win since the work students do in the course is valuable not only for the client but also for the KPMG Cup Showcase and for the students’ future careers as well.
“The entire consulting experience working on a real-life project for a Fortune 500 client taught me that technical skills alone don't drive career success,” Shelke said. “Presentation abilities, interpersonal collaboration, and business-minded thinking are equally critical.”
Collaboration between both business and technological minds is needed, not only in the classroom but also for innovation in the professional world. Shelke and his team proved this through their teamwork and joint effort to take gold in the KPMG Cup Showcase, an experience they will surely take with them into their accomplished futures.