Business Transformation through critical process redesign Industry Dynamics: The European Housing market the main driver

r for Building Material distribution industry, is not out of the woods yet. The housing market has not grown significantly. This has resulted in many of the Building Material Distributors to cut costs and improve their operational efficiencies. Majority of the large distributors have multiple brands acquired either through new product development or through acquisitions. Traditionally, the distribution industry is a low margin business which puts further pressure on the business to look for operational efficiencies but with minimal investments. There have been few instances of cash rich distributors making strategic acquisitions further leading to consolidation in this highly competitive industry. Even though these acquisitions give strategic advantage but pose various challenges of managing and integrating diverse brands, processes and systems. It is critical that large building material distributors make strategic acquisitions and at the same time ensure their processes and systems across their diverse brands are aligned to ensure operational efficiencies, improved competitiveness, and unified brand messaging. Company Background: The client is one of the leading building material distributors in Europe with over 40 bn of revenue. The distributor has 18+ business units, 50+ brands with operations spanning across 4 countries. Considering the challenges of the economic environment, the foremost task for the CIO is to transform their business redesigning their critical business processes across several business units and identify the technology platform to support their core business processes order to cash and procure to pay. In addition, CIO also has to contribute to organization objective of cost reduction. The challenge for Cognizant is to provide Consulting and Advisory services to re-engineer their core business processes across several business units and a detailed IT strategy to address their medium-tolong term strategy. Client Situation: The mere existence of 50+ brands across multiple business units and each having disparate front office processes with varying degrees of flexibility and inefficient back office system resulted in operational inefficiencies within the group. The business processes were not centralized and hence there were variations in the way a particular process was carried out across various brands. There was very little communication between brands resulting in minimal sharing of best practices and in some instances losing business to competition. The legacy architecture along with persistent non availability of the system constrained the operations. Less flexible systems lead to sub optimal customer service levels.

Given this scenario, the CIO of the company has to ensure that the critical business processes are streamlined across the business units and the IT landscape supports the changing business demands. Selling Consulting You have to make a presentation offering Cognizant solution to the clients CIO. You have to ensure that the solution is in line with the clients problem and it is cost effective. In addition, the presentation should make business sense to other decision makers also. Questions Do you think you need additional information to develop the solution for this situation? Given an opportunity to have a discussion with the CIO before the presentation date, what are some of the questions you may ask him? How will you prepare yourself for the Q&A session with the CIO? Your experience has primarily been in the Retail sector. What will be your sources to gain the required domain knowledge to appear knowledgeable about Building Distribution industry? Apart from CBC which other groups do you think will have to be involved in the proposal / project?

Successful Proposals Your presentation made an impact and you have been asked to send the proposal to the client. While writing the proposal, you have to consider that The proposal covers the scope of the problem The proposals focus on clients needs The proposal tells a story It fits in the larger context of Customers business The proposal should focus on Cognizants expertise

Questions What are the various sources of reference you will use to build this proposal? What are the inputs you will need from the internal groups identified earlier to complete this proposal? Your proposal should have a clearly laid out high-level project plan. What are the data points you will need to develop that? In case we do not have the opportunity to go back to the client and ask for the data points what will your approach be for developing the weekly plan. What are the data points you need to compute the estimates?

Project Initiation

As the next step of the consulting engagement, you have to interview various stakeholders and gather information about situation. You have to schedule the interview well in advance and circulate the agenda first. Also create the questionnaire. You have to structure the interviews to avoid focusing too much on one area, repeated questions etc. Consider the duration of the assessment to be 12 weeks. Create interview questionnaires that you are going to use during your interviews. Create a list of all possible material that you will create before and during the engagement. Also have templates of all such material prepared. Also mention any other activities/discussions that you will have as part of your preparation for the engagement. Questions What information would you try to gather in the limited timeframe? Who are the various stakeholders (and how many of them by role) would you interview to gain a deeper and a clearer understanding of the situation? How many hours of their time would you need in total? What are the various information gathering techniques that you think are appropriate for this assignment? Why? What are some of the techniques that may be unsuitable? Why? How will you make sure that the stakeholders are available as scheduled and respond to your interviews with enthusiasm? The users, SMEs and IT staff believe that the transformation program will make them redundant by outsourcing business processes and bringing in new technology to efficiently automate some of their manual tasks. How will you deal with this apprehension and the reluctance about giving adequate information? You hear conflicting comments about the process and application from the VPs, business users and IT staff. How will you handle it? Problem Solving You have spent four weeks reviewing the processes/ enabling technologies and you have identified a number of issues. First you need to define the problem in a clear and specific way. You need to analyze the problem by breaking it into pieces and prioritizing them. You also need to arrive at a model to analyze and compare the same business processes across business units. Build a work plan and revisit your assumptions and data. You then need to layout the resolution by presenting it in a structured, logical way. Questions How will you analyze the business processes across the business units? How will you go about decomposing the problem areas and identifying the critical ones from the non-critical ones? How will you present your assessment of the current situation to the clients? What are the key topics you will talk about? How will you prepare yourself for this presentation?

How will you ensure buy-in from all the stakeholders that you interviewed before you present your content it in a larger forum?

What are the various tools and techniques you will use to analyze the information gathered and provide meaningful insights into possible solutions?

Rules & Guidelines :

Sync-Quest will be held in two stages: Stage 1: Submission of Case Solution No prior registration is required for the event. Teams can download the case details from the website from 6th August. The teams should clearly mention all the assumptions made on a separate page The case analysis should be of maximum Ten pages excluding the cover page and annexure (if any). The document is to be submitted in PDF format. It should be in Arial font, size 10, line spacing 1.15 and 1 inch margin on each side. The cover page should contain Team Name, College Name and Team Details (Name, Email Id and Contact No.). The details of the participants should appear nowhere else in the solution All entries should be mailed to litmus2011.nitie@gmail.com with the file name as SyncQuest_<CollegeName>_<TeamName> and subject line as SyncQuest_<College Name>_<Team Name> Stage 2: Final Presentation Stage 2 will be held in NITIE campus. The shortlisted teams will have to present their solutions in front of the esteemed jury from Cognizant. The shortlisted teams (four confirmed and three waitlisted) will be informed by email. Teams need to send their confirmation regarding participation within 24 hours, failing which, the teams in the waiting list shall be invited Guidelines: The competition is open only to B-school students A team can consist a maximum of two members Both the members of a team should be from same college No person can be part of more than one team Each team can submit only one entry Multiple entries from an institute are permissible

Individual participation certificates will be awarded to all finalists The decision of the organizers of the contest and the panel of judges will be final and binding For any queries, contact

Ankit Mahajan 9702408398 mahajanankit86@gmail.com Pinaki Ghosh 8767980443 pinaki.jam@gmail.com Ritik Gupta 8108761191 ritik.gupta@gmail.com
Important Dates: Launch of Case Submission Deadline Stage I Results Stage II Finals Stage II Results 6th August, 2011 - 0000 hrs 10th 14th 19th 19th August, August, August, August, 2011 - 2359 hrs 2011 2011 2011