Management Consulting

Takeaways
Group 5: Aakar Anyia Arnab Devanshu Radhika
Sahil
Session 1: Brand Consulting - Mr. Mouli Venkatraman
● Doing What You Love
Eg: Google’s employees

● Doing What You’re Good At

1. Culture
2. Capabilities/Competence

● Doing What The World Needs

Value and Market

● Doing What You Can Be Paid For

Viability when you start & Myopia when
you continue
● What differentiates a brand?
1.The brand promise
2.As opposed to products, brands evoke
emotional responses
● Re-Invention (Changing your 4 Ps)
Eg: Cadbury Dairy Milk, Asian Paints
● Suns and Satellites:
1.Sun - Core Attribute i.e who are you &
what are your core values?
2.Satellite - Everything that goes around it
i.e. do all your products have these core
values?
Learning: Play to your strengths, find your DNA
Underlying Issue: Ruosh didn’t focus on what
they love & what they’re good at.
Learning: Evolve or perish - Importance of
touchpoints
Underlying Issue: Brand Relevance & Re-
Inventing
Learning: Intimate understanding of Consumer
Behavior - A working business model
Underlying Issue: Didn’t focus on what will the
consumer pay for
Session 2: Supply Chain Consulting - Dr. Ganesh
● Supply Chain is all about cross functional integration.
● The whole team is together i.e. ‘one person can’t solve the problem’.
● Cross Functional Coordination: Entire gang moves at the speed of the slowest member.
● Supply Chain needs Team Effort so it’s about Transformational Approach.
● It’s all about having a vision and then coordinating accordingly.
● Having a bottom up approach with the correct rationale is better than having a top down approach in
cases where the ground staff knows the best.

RELATING TO CONCEPTS:

1. Sales & Distribution Management:

As learned in Sales and Distribution Management, sales team has the most ground knowledge - about
products, customer needs, logistics requirements, sales plan, route plans and beat plans. Therefore, a
bottoms up approach in consultation with the sales team yield in more appropriate estimates than a top
down approach.
2. SEES: Vision and Coordination
We learnt that firms with visionary leaders who have the capabilities to implement their goals and bring
about change are the most successful ones.

3. HRM: Performance Management

Balanced Scorecard Parameters:
* Organizational Capacity / Learning & Growth
* Internal Process
* Customer and Stakeholder
* Financial.

4. Supply Chain & Operations Management: Order & Demand Management can be more accurate and
can be aided by:
* Right Forecasting Method to maximize accuracy
* Sales team that has a lot of on field knowledge
* Right Forecasting Process
* Right Forecasting Algorithm
Session 3: Marketing Consulting - Mr. Vineesh Chadha
Session 4: Strategy Consulting - Mr. Naru Narayanan
• Develop an affinity : It is very important for a people like consultants who meet hundreds of people
each and every day to connect with people, thus to have charismatic and memorable personality and
ensure that people find it easy to relate with them through something which both are passionate for,
which could be something very simple such as jogging or humor or something widely complicated
such as deep knowledge of history etc. and thus remember them
• Mantras: It is very crucial for a consultant to have few mantras handy to make an impactful and
impressive speech. The mantras though need not be original but should be the ones which could be
easily put into practice and could be articulated and implemented efficiently. Example- Time, quality
and price (pick any two) or when entry barriers are low, product market gets commoditized.
• Crossing the chasm: Referring to the challenging strategic and marketing process by which
technology startups transition from selling their products and/or services to innovators and early
adopters to selling to the early majority, a.k.a. pragmatists; this transition (“crossing the chasm”) entails
a dramatic shift in mentality for the startup
Automobile Sector:
• Current Government’s policies have reduced the liquidity in the market, which has further contributed
to the overall mood being negative
• Government made some announcements indicating directly as well indirectly its affinity towards
‘Electric Cars’ and that they will be coming in recent years, thus people stopped the purchase of fuel
cars as they are unsure of the policies of government in this sector in the near future

Climate Change:
• Growing jobs and economic opportunity as US also wants to back out of Geneva Treaty for economic
benefits
• Ever growing need for ideas promoting sustainability

Impending World Recession

• US economy grew by 2.1% in 2019 compared to 4% in 2018, global world GDP expansion rate
decreased to 2.2% in 2019 down from 4.7% in 2018 and average weekly working hours decreased
from 35% in 2018 to 34.3%.
• Interest rate cuts
• Companies like Swiggy decrease on price and eventually on quality, thus having a ‘Cloud Kitchen’
where people buy from ‘Bowl’ instead of ‘Mainland China’
Session 5: Financial Consulting - Mr. K. Chandrasekar
Session 6: McKinsey Tear-Down Session - Mr. Sriram
● The continual product development includes an overall analysis consisting of:
Competition
Low cost competition products and faster introduction of products. Example: Zara bring in new trends in less than
6 months.
Technology
In today’s ever-changing dynamic world, there is high speed of commoditization and shorter life cycle of products.
Example: movies if run for more than a week are considered a success.
Customers
Now-a-days there are diverse customer preferences and stronger preference for good enough products.

● Green Line
Value drivers- customers can see, feel and care for such features. Any enhancement in these can fetch
premium. Example: no one notices how many capacitors are there in the phone but if we change the display size
or camera location, people will notice.
Grey Area- Customers can see feel and experience but do not care for such features. Example: Blackberry:
brought into notice the importance of back cover by introducing the matt finish cover
Cost Levers- Customers cannot feel, see and experience these and thus do not care much for them.
‘Green Line’ is optimized on right value proposition of a product
 ● DTV (Design To Value): It is an integrated approach to solve products and manage challenges by
understanding customer value and cost-drivers. It is a fact based, multi-dimensional approach to
product development and product references that enables companies to maximize their value.

Keeping the design to value as the core, there are three main concepts that surround it such as:

1. Idea Generation: this includes define and arrange competition, also ensure to check for cannibalization
and comparing the products and finally coming up with a product which is ideal.
2. Pre-work: this includes cost-constraint analysis and Green-line assertion
3. Idea Evaluation: Potential Scan considering CAPEX and OPEX, considering the Timeline To Realize
i.e. the time to integrate idea in volume and also taking into account Difficulty Scan to check level of idea
difficulty from capability