How to win Flipkart Wired 3.0? -By Team White Tiger from SJMSOM, IIT Bombay

We think the case presented by Flipkart Wired 3.0 was very open in nature. Only basic information about the case was given. But this openness of the case is what made the case study more interesting. We were able to think about various aspects and could work on them!

For all the rounds of Flipkart Wired 3.0, we spent around 3-5 days working on the case and preparing the presentation. The organization had already ventured into this business earlier in 2016 but later they closed it because of heavy losses. So, the biggest challenge was how to make an implementable solution for the firm, when they have already failed earlier and none of the other organizations in this space is in profit. 

Our strategic strategy

The most important strategy we used was to first learn more about the business and how our competitors in business are performing. While benchmarking, we tried to understand the recent failures of different organisations as well. In our strategy, we focused more on making our solution implementable. Thus we started with how the organization will go about implementing it. We initiated a pilot project and then finally moved on to a phase-wise implementation in different parts of the country. We also tried to adopt good practices from our competitors and other logistics companies.

The National round

After submission from 22 B-School campus winners, 5 teams were selected for the National round. To us, the teams from NITIE would be the toughest competitors. We think when it comes to Supply Chain and Operations case studies, both the college have the same curriculum and this really makes them a tough competitor. The judges were industry stalwarts who were working in the hyperlocal division of Flipkart, and being appreciated by them, really made us happy that day.

Intricate learnings

The case was on hyperlocal, and we learned a lot about the hyperlocal business. We learned how to benchmark a business based on different parameters and adapt those to our solutions, forecasting and how to conduct a business survey. Another major learning was how to structure our thoughts and ideas to our business solution effectively.

Team diversity

We were people with different backgrounds. We had a member from a telecom background, who had ideas on how we can use concepts from telecom business to given case study. The other member had experience in the e-commerce industry, thus the applicability of such concepts was verified. The third member had a consulting background, and he was much particular about structuring and further detailing of those ideas.     

We believe, we had a very good experience of working in a team. Also, it is normal to have conflicts when working in a team. We also had faced conflicts, mostly during the ideation stage of our solution. But we generally resolved them by giving logical arguments and in some cases through voting. But all of us worked together in every phase.

In fact, in this entire journey of Flipkart Wired 3.0 there is a moment that is close to our heart as a team. There was a day when we had to submit the case study solution for the national round and in the meantime, we also had our semester exams. But the night before the exam, all three of us were still discussing, fighting and devising new plans to make our solution implementable to the organization in a better way. We still remember those moments, in hindsight it seems so good but at those moments, we were afraid, excited and a little confused too!