Case Studies
- First Prize Winners: Team Skywalkers - Ankit Sinha & Prateek Bhargava. This team wins 2 blackberry phones
- Second Prize Winners: B Prashanth & Gandharv S Bakshi . This team wins Rs 10,000 in cash.
- All 5 finalist teams will get citations. A special note of appreciation towards the presentation by Ajit Shekhawat and Brijendra Arya. Their presentation earned the highest marks on product planning.
- We very sincerely appreciate the quality of the presentations and the effort put in by the teams. It had become a very difficult job declaring the winners list. The entire exercise has truly been a learning experience for us as well.
Thanks to all 23 groups that participated. The following 5 groups have been shortlisted for the final presentation
- Lakshminarayan Swaminathan&Navin Madhavan - Case Noah
- Prateek Bhargava&Ankit Sinha - Case Noah
- Brijendra Arya&Ajit Singh Shekhawat - Case Noah
- M Manikanda Prabhu&Shiv Mohan Sharma - Case Noah
- Gandharv S Bakshi&B Prashanth - Case Solomon
- The finalists will have till the 17th of Jan, 2009 to make changes to their presentation. Feedback per case will be sent to the finalists. It is not mandatory for the teams to incorporate the feedback into their presentations
- The final round will be held over video-conferencing on the 18th of Jan, 2009. Exact timings will be announced soon
- All finalists will get a citation. This is in addition to the prizes announced earlier
- The case competition is open to IIMB students of the PGDM program graduating in both 2010 and 2011. However, the participating student from the graduating class of 2010 must team up with a student from the graduating class of 2011. No such restrictions apply to students from the graduating class of 2011
- A team can have a maximum of 2 students
- All content should be original i.e. no plagiarism. All references to external work must be cited
- All submissions will need to be in Microsoft Presentation format(ppt/pptx) and need to be emailed by Jan 10, 2010 to
- Shortlists and a detailed schedule will be announced on this site soon. All submissions will be acknowledged within 12 hours of receipt
- You may attempt from any of the following two cases for your submission
- The winning team will get 2 BlackBerry cellphone handsets. The runners-up will get a cash prize of Rs. 10,000
ABC BPO is an established contact center with very healthy revenues from a client set that includes Fortune 100 companies. However, market trends indicate that clients are looking at end to end outsourcing vendors that can provide all software solution as well as contact center needs. ABC’s CEO is worried that the revenue streams will now get squeezed and that the company will no longer remain profitable as it used to be.
After much debate and discussion, the CEO decides to sell technology solutions bundled with contact center offerings instead of the plain vanilla contact center that they are selling today to increase both revenues as well as profits. He has also already ruled out setting up centers in developed markets and is keen on setting up centers in the emerging markets, starting with the Indian domestic market.
He hires you as his strategy, business development and marketing lead and asks you to come up with a strategy through which he can maximize revenue and achieve market leadership by doing the above. He then asks you to make a plan to him and the senior management of the organization, and this must contain at least the following:
After much debate and discussion, the CEO decides to sell technology solutions bundled with contact center offerings instead of the plain vanilla contact center that they are selling today to increase both revenues as well as profits. He has also already ruled out setting up centers in developed markets and is keen on setting up centers in the emerging markets, starting with the Indian domestic market.
He hires you as his strategy, business development and marketing lead and asks you to come up with a strategy through which he can maximize revenue and achieve market leadership by doing the above. He then asks you to make a plan to him and the senior management of the organization, and this must contain at least the following:
- Products and solutions the organization can develop to increase its revenues and profits. All products and solutions must be targeted at contact center requirements only.
- Target customer segments that the company should go after.
- Revenue models and product & solutions pricing.
- A broad and overall strategy for positioning.
ABC BPO is an established contact center with very healthy revenues from a client set that includes Fortune 100 companies. Lately, ABC’s CEO is concerned that profit margins will decrease due to increasing costs of outsourcing.
The CEO hires a boutique strategy consulting firm, McBCG, who advise that the company must diversify to sustain profit margins. McBCG’s suggestion is that ABC should offer best of breed, SaaS delivered, software products for the SMB segment of the contact center industry. Given ABC’s several years of BPO experience, the company can leverage its domain knowledge and best practices. Since a lot of software currently used in ABC was developed by an in-house software development team, ABC may have a head start in developing the software for the external market.
McBCG also advise that there are two possible ways the company can go –
The presentation must cover the following
The CEO hires a boutique strategy consulting firm, McBCG, who advise that the company must diversify to sustain profit margins. McBCG’s suggestion is that ABC should offer best of breed, SaaS delivered, software products for the SMB segment of the contact center industry. Given ABC’s several years of BPO experience, the company can leverage its domain knowledge and best practices. Since a lot of software currently used in ABC was developed by an in-house software development team, ABC may have a head start in developing the software for the external market.
McBCG also advise that there are two possible ways the company can go –
- Make the end to end suite of contact center software – In this case, ABC will be making all the software that a contact center needs and would be competing with companies such as Interactive intelligence, Contactual, Working Solutions, OnState, InContact. The CEO prefers this approach since an integrated, end-to-end suite can be used by ABC in its contact center expansion plans as well.
- The other option is to make a few function specific contact center software (not the entire suite) - In this case, ABC will be competing with highly specialized companies. Examples of these companies include Aspect, Irene, IEX (workforce management software); Cisco, Avaya, Genesys (telephony platforms); Nice (quality assurance software); PeopleSoft, Simployee (HR); SAP (analytics).
The presentation must cover the following
- The advantages/disadvantages of choosing one approach over the other
- Most interesting product features of the competitors’ products that you must implement
- The factors/features that give the competitor a very strong competitive advantage
- A detailed product roadmap that specifies what should be built and in what sequence, such that it enables ABC to emerge as a strong competitor
