MINDSHARE November 2014

MINDSHARE 1 November 2014

Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad

Research and Consultancy Enterprise,

IMT Ghaziabad

Research and Consultancy Enterprise (RACE), formed in 2007 is the official consulting club of IMT Ghaziabad. It is exclusively managed by the students of IMT Ghaziabad under the mentorship of IMT faculty. Its main objective is to maximize the value of the clients by providing insights to their specific problems. RACE offers solutions in five different verticals: Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, Operations and IT. RACE has provided consulting solutions to a number of reputed firms; AMUL, SAF (South Asia Foundation), Grasim, Bob Martin, Test Funda being a few of the clients. The current core team of RACE has 10 members from the 2013-15 batch and 13 members from the 2014-16 batch. The average industry work experience of the team is around 2.5 years. The members have previously worked with well-known companies in various sectors ranging from IT/ITES, Core manufacturing, Oil and Gas, FMCG and BFSI.

Activities: We at RACE have a vision to channelize the efforts of students interested in consulting by providing a common platform for industry and faculty interactions. The club anchors these

efforts by conducting various events and workshops from time to time for aspirants to learn and imbibe necessary consulting skills. Our major responsibilities include interacting with professionals, implementing operational consultancy projects for IMT Ghaziabad, conducting consulting workshops and bringing relevant short term corporate projects. We also organize various guest lecture from many reputed and keynote industry speakers bringing about the awareness related to consulting profile and its nuances. We have associations with various start-ups for providing industry exposure to students in terms of internship opportunities. One of the key and worth mentioning initiative which RACE has undertaken recently is the development of the Hello IMT Mobile app. This app is an attempt to bring all the relevant information for students, ranging from important announcements, and mess menu, utilities and services contact details on a single platform accessible to all at the click of a button.



Contents

Why companies should care about e-care? 3

The Impact of Analytics on Consulting 5

Life as a Consultant: Exclusive interview with Marquis from McKinsey 6

How consulting helps firm simplify and organize their Cloud Services 9

Supplier Risk Management: The ripple effect 10

Consultant’s Lingo 11

DILBERT 12

Guesstimate?? 12



Why companies

should care about e-

care? By Raffaella Bianchi, Davide Schiavotto, Daniel Svoboda

Digital customer service is now a strategic imperative, but its adoption is hampered by weaknesses in delivery strategies and incomplete measurement of its effectiveness.

A European telecommunications

company wanted to lower the cost of its

customer service operations but worried about

the potential loss of revenue from the cross-

selling that its traditional call centers did so well.

In investigating its options, the company learned

that 70 percent of existing customer-service

contacts could be delivered through digital

solutions that had proved effective in other

industries. By migrating part of its customer-

service operations to similar digital-care

programs with a smart strategic approach, the

company lowered the unit’s costs by as much as

30 percent, with no loss of revenue.

Already well-established in banking and financial

services, digital customer care—so-called e-

care—is now making inroads in other industries.

E-care involves the delivery of customer service

via web-based user accounts, social networks,

mobile phone, and the Internet rather than call

centers or facilities open to the public such as

retail stores or service counters. Such digital

services are increasingly demanded by

customers, who are already using digital

platforms to research and review products, as

well as broadcast their service frustrations. And it

makes sense from a financial perspective, too: e-

care has the potential to significantly lower the

cost of customer service operations while

increasing customer satisfaction.

Of course, it’s not simply a matter of adding

digital options to traditional customer-service

channels. In our experience, e-care must be

approached as a one- to two-year multistage

transformation, undertaken with the same degree

of planning and rigor as a major product launch

or other strategic initiative and backed by heavy

initial C-suite support. In addition, careful

thought must be given to the degree of

digitization desired: digital care can be fully self-

serve or involve a mix of live customer-service

agents; not all options need to be available on

every digital platform, and e-care should not be

implemented as aggressively as where there is

significant potential for upselling. Yet we believe

that the rewards of adopting e-care are worth the

effort, and virtually every consumer-facing

industry requiring extensive customer-

relationship management—from cable operators

and consumer electronics to healthcare and

utilities—can benefit.

Getting from here to e-care

Digital customer service has become a significant

factor in both purchase and service transactions:

roughly 70 percent of telecommunications

purchase journeys occur in part or in whole

online, as do 90 percent of service

journeys.1 Digital customer service also provides

superior customer satisfaction: our research

shows that 76 percent of telecommunications

customers are satisfied with a customer service

journey that is fully digital, compared with 57

percent satisfaction for interactions through

traditional channels (exhibit). When you

consider that migration to e-care can, in our

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/why_companies_should_care_about_ecare



experience, reduce call volumes and operating

expenses by 25 to 30 percent, its benefits seem

obvious.

Yet these statistics mask the fact that few

purchase journeys or service interactions are

handled entirely digitally: according to our

survey, while 41 percent of service interactions

with telecommunications companies begin on an

e-care platform, just 15 percent are digital from

start to finish. Additionally, the rigorous fact-

based management that accompanies traditional

customer-service delivery is often absent from e-

care. In our survey, we found that less than 40

percent of companies track key performance

indicators related to customer experience for

mobile channels and only 50 to 60 percent do for

online interactions. In contrast, a typical call

center tracks more than five metrics to manage

customer experience.

The problem is that companies from customer-

facing industries that deploy multiple customer

service channels too often assess the effectiveness

of e-care by measuring individual channels, when

customers today often move from one channel to

another as they try to resolve service issues. They

may start looking for an answer on the company’s

website before switching to its mobile app,

posting a comment or question via social media,

and then finally turning to the call center if they

have been unable to find an answer elsewhere.

That’s why it’s critical to measure the

multichannel effectiveness of e-care—something

many companies still are not capable of doing.

For instance, how many customer-service calls no

longer need to go to a call center because the

customer’s problems have been resolved through

digital options? How many customers are seeking

service through digital channels only, instead of

using a mix of call centers and digital channels?

How many service requests are initiated in one

channel and completed in another, thus

effectively increasing cost per request?

Customer-service managers should be asking for

this kind of data and examining it monthly, if not

more often, as they judge the effectiveness of e-

care efforts. The paradox is that while 70 percent

of customer-care contacts at telecommunications

companies are digital, they have produced only a

small share of cost savings.

Taking a systematic approach to e-care can not

only reduce costs and improve service but also

bring a company closer to its customers, who now

actively use digital platforms to research and

review products, purchase services, and

communicate problems. Digital customer service

increases customer satisfaction, but it cannot

simply be bolted on to traditional customer-

service channels. The transition to e-care is a one-

to two-year multistage project that must have

substantial C-suite support at the outset. But we

believe that adopting e-care is worth the effort

and that virtually every consumer-facing industry

that has high customer-relationship needs can

benefit from it.



The Impact of

Analytics on

Consulting By Karan Ahuja, Zenesys

Anyone who has read the book “McKinsey Way” on consulting will recall that author Ethan Rasiel strongly emphasizes that consulting solutions need to be fact based, firmly structured and hypothesis driven. So the very first task for a consultant is to seek out the facts.

Back in the early days of consulting, fact

gathering was a manual process. Information had

to be gathered meticulously by conducting client

interviews on the shop floor, all the way up to the

board level and then from subject matter experts

in the industry.

In the last decade or so, a vast amount of

information has become available in form of

syndicated reports and in open domain on the

Internet. This basically has made way for

secondary research or desk research. Consultants

in this era started spending less time on direct

interviews and more on gathering facts through

secondary research. This saved time and

generally gave a higher confidence in the data.

For example, consultants no longer have to

interview sales team at Gillette to determine how

many razor blades they are selling. They can

easily find such information by conducting a few

searches or by buying an industry report on

worldwide razor market.

In the third wave of fact gathering process,

analytics is fast becoming the game changer. To

be precise, analytics is not replacing the fact

gathering process, but rather, it’s taking basic

level facts and giving us the ability to triangulate

new insights in a semi-automated manner.

Let us walk through an example to illustrate how

this is happening. Let us assume that Gillette

hires a consultant to determine the potential sales

for a new kind of razor in Brazil.

Here, one approach would be to build a

framework that would need the following inputs

as the facts (in Brazil):

1. Existing Gillette market share

2. Brand strength

3. Total razor market potential in Brazil

4. Economic conditions and trends

5. Consumer buying behavior and trends

6. Price sensitivity for

consumer/consumable goods.

Item 1, is probably the fastest obtained by asking

Gillette. However, the rest are much more

complex and involved if it were to be done

manually. However, with analytics, determining

brand strength, economic trends, consumer

trends and price sensitivity is not only easy but

much more powerful. All this data can be

consolidated to come up with innovative

predictive models to estimate the potential sales

and the same models can be replicated with

updated facts across new domains (regions or

industries).

If you were a consulting firm specializing in

consumer goods then you would be well advised

to constantly keep abreast of items 4, 5 and 6

because when you get another market entry

project, you have the most up to date facts.

Practically all consulting firms are investing

heavily in analytics and creating “readymade”

online libraries of “fact streams”.

The good news for consulting aspirants in India is

that most of the MBA students are also past

software engineers or have some sort of an IT

background. This is a great help in learning,

developing and understanding how to apply

analytics in consulting.

To get started, learn statistical programming

languages such as R, STATA or SAS. Then train

yourselves in visualization software such as

Tableau, Qlik, Datawatch or Tibco Spotfire.



Life as a

Consultant:

Exclusive interview

with Marquis from

McKinsey

Please note, the personal views and

opinions expressed are strictly those

of the interviewee and do not reflect

the views of the interviewee’s

employers or affiliated entities.

1. For the benefit of readers, can you

give us a summary of your

background?

I’m originally from a small town in Virginia and,

through some miracle, I ended up at Princeton

University, where I earned an A.B. in Computer

Science. After college, I worked as a Software

Engineer for a couple of companies (a internet

consulting firm in NYC and a software and

systems engineering firm in the DC area), focused

primarily on Java development. While at the

second company, I earned my first graduate

degree, an M.S. in Management of Information

Technology from the University of Virginia, as the

first step toward stepping from behind a

computer to learning about management. After

five years as a Software Engineer, I attended the

Stanford Graduate School of Business and

completed a joint-degree program, earning an

MBA and an M.A. in Education. Following

business school, I spent a couple of years as a

consultant at McKinsey & Company, where I

worked on projects in a range of

industries/functions. In late 2008, I left

McKinsey and started an exciting new gig in

Chicago, where I’ve been for two months now.

2. What sparked your interest in

McKinsey as a career? Can you tell us

about your recruiting experience with

the firm?

My interest in McKinsey was sparked prior to

applying to business school as I researched the

management consulting industry. During this

research, I found that McK had a reputation for

creating CEO’s and other business and

organizational leaders, which is what I aspired to

become. Also, I learned that it was known for

tackling mission critical issues for its clients,

which also appealed to me. Finally, I thought that

having a stint at McKinsey would do wonders for

my own professional brand since my first

employer collapsed after the dot-com bubble

burst and my second employer was too small for

anyone to have ever heard of.

My recruiting experience with the Firm was very

straight-forward and positive overall. It started

during the first year at Stanford by attending

several events and getting to know people, which

confirmed my liking for the place. I was dinged

for the summer internship after second-round

interviews, but several people from McK stayed in

touch with me during that summer, which made

me put McK back at the top of my list for the full-

time recruiting process. Fortunately, I did better

the second time around and was able to secure a

full-time offer. My experience was so good that I

devoted significant attention to recruiting once I

joined the Firm in order to have a positive impact

on the recruiting of other candidates.



3. What do you think are the most

important lessons you took away

from McKinsey?

It’s difficult to give a short answer to this question

because I learned a lot in my years at McK. A few

lessons that come to mind are:

1. The Consulting Toolkit — Structured

problem solving, analytics, frameworks to think

about business issues, methods to effective

present/lay-out arguments/analyses, etc

2. Ways to leverage both EQ (emotional

quotient) and IQ (intellectual quotient) —

I’ve heard it said that EQ gets you through life and

IQ gets you through school. I’ve always been a

killer EQ guy, but McK taught me how to

effectively leverage IQ to be even more effective.

3. Importance of developing a network of

supporters within an organization/office/etc.

4. Ability to get spun up on a particular company,

industry, function, or topic very quickly

and develop a perspective on it.

5. Understanding of the impact of professional

presence and tools to develop that presence.

6. Importance of maintaining a strong work-life

balance (I was terrible at it, so I learned from the

downside of it…more on this below).

4. Any last words of advice to

prospective consultants?

As you can imagine, many of my reader requests

are for advice about consulting, so I’ve thought

and written about this a LOT. You know that

consulting people like to use structure whenever

possible, right? So, I’ll break this into two parts:

getting the job and then nailing the job.

Winning an offer in consulting is no easy feat, so

prospective applicants need to be on point from

the beginning. Here are a few lessons that I

learned along the way in my own process:

1. Start preparing for case interviews as early

as possible (case prep guides, practice

cases, mental math exercises, etc)

2. Do as much due diligence on the

different firms as possible(leverage

company websites, recruiting sessions,

industry publications, etc)

3. Develop your “Why Company X is a fit

for me” and “Why I am a fit for

Company X” stories early on and continue

to sharpen them as you find out more about

the firms during the due diligence process.

4. Take stock of your professional, educational,

and life experiences and figure out how to

concisely describe them in depth (this will be

helpful in the fit interviews).

5. Remember that you have a lot to offer

wherever you end up, so, if you don’t get a

consulting offer, the world will not end, your

life will not be over, and it doesn’t mean that

you’re not a high-quality candidate.

Once a person gets their consulting offer, they

should immediately shift their mindset to

preparing to do well at the job. To address this

point, I’ll leverage some content I wrote for an

entry a while back because the readers here might

find it useful. With that in mind, my top-10 list of

tips for soon-to-be consultants are:

1. Be confident, but humble

2. Get really good at Excel modeling (or any

other core skill to the job) as early as

possible

3. Always present the best “you” as possible

4. Be prepared to be pushed

5. Don’t be afraid to seek help when

needed

6. Build a support network within your

office as early as possible

7. Show enthusiasm and interest

8. Always execute on deliverables



9. Don’t be afraid to be active/vocal in team

settings

10. Sign up for frequent flier, hotel loyalty, and

rewards credit cards as early as possible (if

you’re going to be living out of a suitcase, you

might as well benefit from it, right?)

And, one last piece of advice…be prepared for the

strain that the job can put on real-life

relationships with significant others, family,

friends, colleagues, etc. I underestimated this

point going in and was totally unprepared for the

difficult process of balancing the job with the

personal relationships I valued. I still wonder

how things might have turned out differently if I’d

been more prepared for this issue from the

beginning.



How consulting

helps firms simplify

and organize their

Cloud Services By Erin Hichman

To make a grand generalization: Everyone, at one

time or other in his or her life, has come to the

realization that over the years a collection of some

sort has grown to the point of disorganization and

resulted in redundant items. Let’s take shoes as

an example. You buy a pair here and a pair there

over months and years. One day you are able to

see past your desire for just one more pair, and in

a moment of weakness assess your current

supply.

The assessment is alarming. You realize your

shoes are stored throughout various rooms and

floors in the house, including but not limited to

ten pairs of black dress shoes, counting two that,

oddly enough, are exactly the same only different

sizes (Why different sizes? What was I thinking

when I made this purchase?) and that there is a

clear lack of a pair of comfortable flip-flops.

Replace shoes with cloud services and uses, and

you have a picture of what many companies in the

US are dealing with today. Since the “rise of

cloud” (2007 to 2009), companies in the US have

surely and steadily been adding a cloud service

here and a cloud service there. These cloud

service additions have been within the confines of

a department or group without insight into other

groups and outside of the IT department’s view.

The practice of adding cloud services in silos and

based on specific department needs often results

in overlapping and many different contracts with

the same vendors. Adding cloud services in an ad

hoc fashion without an overarching cloud

strategy is inefficient, difficult to manage and

often occurs without consideration of IT security

guidelines.

The result of many years of cloud services and

uses additions has left many US companies with

an expanding, hard-to-manage, overlapping and

ungoverned cloud environment. Needless to say,

this is not an ideal scenario for the IT

department.

To unravel this mess of cloud services and uses,

companies in the US are turning to consulting

firms to understand how to create a manageable

cloud environment that aligns with company and

IT policies. Consulting firms begin where we

began with the shoe assessment example—

evaluating what a company currently has and

identifying redundancies and filling gaps.

Consulting firms’ knowledge of enterprise-level

operations coupled with a broad view of cloud (as

opposed to a cloud vendor, which only focuses on

one piece of the puzzle) allows them to eliminate

overlapping services and vendor agreements and

develop processes and procedures to create a

cohesive cloud ecosystem that is transparent and

in-line with company and IT guidelines.

Working with a consulting firm on developing an

ideal cloud landscape for a company will not only

keep the CIO happy, but will allow the company

to take full advantage of the efficiencies cloud has

to offer, while simultaneously achieving much

needed “spring cleaning” of cloud services.



Supplier Risk

Management: The

ripple effect By Pallavi V. Challa, IMT Ghaziabad

Supplier Risk management is an evolving

practice in operations management.

Organizations which are highly dependent on

suppliers to attain business goals, such as

government agencies, financial institutions,

retailers and manufacturers use outsourcing and

lean supply chain initiatives to reduce overall

costs and expand into new markets, apart from

assessing the effects of a supplier being acquired,

going bankrupt or suddenly closing operations.

Consulting firms such as McKinsey, Boston

Consulting Group (BCG), Bain and Co., Deloitte,

Pricewaterhouse Cooper (Pwc) provide solutions

to various firms to reduce and monitor supplier

risk. According to a study conducted by BCG,

there are five broad levers for the success of

supplier risk management (SRM):

1. Top level management engagement:

Senior management must actively support SRM

and communicate the same to the top level

management. SRM reviews must be held

periodically and generally follow a standard

format with clear guidelines and procedures in

case potential problems are highlighted.

2. Supplier segmentation on the basis of

risk: Companies generally contract with

hundreds and thousands of suppliers; it is not

possible to manage detailed risk assessment and

mitigation strategies for all of them.

Organizations should pick the suppliers to focus

on through a formalized process, divide vendors

into different categories on the basis of financial

health, components supplied, industry outlook,

and time to switch to substitute supplier, supplier

value add and power. High risk suppliers must be

review often, so that quick action can be taken on

identified issues. More frequent the risk

assessment, more successful the risk

identification.

3. Rigorously Measure and Manage Risk:

Collecting cross functional data, such as

frequency of key personnel leaving, disaster

management of suppliers, makes the risk

assessment process more rigorous.

4. Collaborate with Key Suppliers: BCG

consultants feel that few companies can single-

handedly take on the cost managing risk across

the entire supply chain. Disruptions in a

lean supply chain can lead to immediate

financial and operational problems.

5. Tools and Training provided to

managers: Every company recognizes that

supplier risk management is essential; however,

few educate their managers on how to do it well.

Support from technological tools is also lacking in

many companies.

As supply chains grow and become more global,

more interconnected, they have become more

vulnerable, with less margin to absorb the effects

of disruptions and delays. Deloitte has been

named a leader by the Kennedy Vanguard of

Supply Chain Risk Management Consulting

Providers in Kennedy’s Supply Chain Risk

Management Consulting, 2012-2015 report

covering the supply chain risk market.

As the supply chain risks grow more costly, more

comprehensive and resilient approaches are

required to manage that risk. Leading consulting

firms are now being approached o help

organizations deal with the dynamic challenges of

supply chain for increased efficiency, agility and

competitiveness.



Consultant’s Lingo

5,000 mile view: a phrase used to describe a

high-level, summary view of the situation. 5,000

can be replaced by any large number to indicate

the same thing

80/20 rule: belief that 80% of the effects come

from 20% of the causes; in consulting, this term

is used to imply that 80% of an assignment can be

finished in 20% of the time.

Boil the ocean: as the name states, clearly an

impossible task. Generally, a project manager or

partner will say “Let’s not boil the ocean” as a

pretext for suggesting a ton of analyses that in

effect, often ends up boiling a very large lake, if

not exactly the ocean.

Bottoms-up: expression meaning to look at the

smallest units possible to initiate analysis (e.g.,

bottoms-up analysis of a company would start

with its lowest-level employees and then work its

way to upper management).

Buckets: categories; this is the extent of this

word’s definition, so it remains a mystery why

people choose to employ the former term; also

used as a transitive verb to mean ‘categorize’.

Low-hanging fruit: the initial opportunities,

areas of exploration, etc. that are easiest to cover;

intended to evoke visual imagery of fruit-laden

trees, suggesting that much remains beyond the

lowest boughs; syn. quick win.

MECE: mutually exclusive, collectively

exhaustive. A term originating at McKinsey and

common across management consulting firms,

it’s a grouping principle that in the words of

Wikipedia, “data in a group should be divided

into subgroups that comprehensively represent

that group (no gaps) without overlapping”.

Sniff test: as in evaluating food for rancidity,

this term is used when gauging the viability or

reasonableness of a particular analysis; var. smell

test



DILBERT

Guesstimate??

1. Its noon, a professional thief in

downtown Manhattan has to decide

which one of the three stores is the most

convenient (meaning profitable) for him

to rob: a bakery, a flower shop, or a

luxury chandelier store. Assume that the

thief won’t be caught, which store should

he choose? What factors should he

consider in making the decision?

2. How many fish are there in all the world’s

seas? (Not including lakes, rivers, etc.)

3. It is the year 2005. Your client Lenovo is

in planning to set up BPO (Business

process outsourcing) call centers in India

and they need to know whether the talent

supply in India is sufficient for the next

five years, i.e. for the period 2005 – 2010.

You have been brought in by Lenovo to

figure out the pool of people available for

hiring for such call centers. How would

you go about the case?

Note: Guesstimate questions are usually asked in consulting job interviews. There is no fixed answer to

these questions, the interviewer is more interested in your logic and thought process than the final answer

you come up with.

MINDSHARE November 2014

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