How to win EXL Acumen 2019? -By Team Kodi-Koders from IIM Kozhikode

EXL Acumen 2019 helped us learn Data Analytics tools and algorithms, their applications in business scenarios, and also a lot of other technical aspects. Since the case was on customer churn, we also learned about various business strategies adopted by several industries & companies to mitigate challenges in attracting customers. 

EXL Acumen 2019 was very well organised as the instructions from the beginning to end of the competition were clear and crisp, without leaving any ambiguity. The judges were also fair and impartial to every team. They were patient and had a keen interest in every presentation. The competition was split into 3 rounds to adjudge the winners. First being the designing of predictive models and predicting data points, the second round was devising strategy and the last round was the final presentation in front of the leadership team of EXL.

The winning strategy

For round 1, we broke the problem statement into smaller problems and learned our way around newer concepts like R, MATLAB, Tableau & courses like Data Analytics to formulate a predictive model for predicting data. This helped us to predict data points with high accuracy. A major challenge in this stage was to apply the analytical tools as none of us had very high proficiency in analytics.

For the second round of EXL Acumen 2019, we further dived deep into data and came up with a realistic solution for the identified problem, i.e, devising a strategy to mitigate the identified problems. Here, the major challenge was to identify the data-driven insights to maximum accuracy to come up with the requisite strategy. We put in hours visualizing and cleaning the data and then learning software to apply them. 

Finale and the unexpected tragedy

We had close to 10 days to prepare for the final presentation of EXL Acumen 2019. We made good use of that time to re-evaluate our solution and make final changes. We went to Delhi on the day of Finale. Here the most unexpected things happened to us. Upon landing at Delhi airport, we came to know that we were required to squeeze the entire presentation into just one slide. This would not be a big problem if anything else bad did not happen as we still had around 2 hours before the presentation program. However, to make matters worse, Amisha, one of our teammates found out that her baggage has been misplaced by the airlines. We spent the next 1.5 hrs roaming around with airline officials in the hope of finding the lost bag, but in vain. 

So, we were without a ppt and she did not have formal attire. In that feeling of despair, we thought that this was the end of the road for us. But just as they say that after every night comes the dawn, the worst part was over for us. When we told the HR of our problem, she told us not to worry about formals and promised us to keep our presentation at the last so that we had enough time in our hands to complete our ppt. 

When we arrived at the EXL office, the presentation round had already begun and we were still brainstorming what needed to be put in the slide. When our turn arrived, we had just finished our slide. We took a minute to discuss and ensured that none of us seemed nervous and had our confidence affected by the earlier events of the day. All the six teams which made it to the National Finale were a good competition but the team Gunners (IIM Ahmedabad) and team Joka 56 (IIM Calcutta) appeared the toughest contenders as they presented the Data Visualization part very well which we had put only in our Appendix. But our team did not lose faith in our hard work at any moment and faced them with full confidence.

The team and learnings

Collectively, our 2-member team was very adaptive and has always loved to face challenges. Though neither of us had much exposure to Analytics before this, we took up the herculean task of learning a bit about them and then plunging into the problem. Amisha is very good in Financial Analysis and Strategy. She has excellent Excel skills which helped us in data analysis immensely. Sayantan has a knack for Strategy and Operations and has taken a recent interest in Analytics and Finance. He had some exposure to SQL and Tableau before, along with elementary knowledge of some Machine Learning algorithms, which added to our team’s strengths.

As a result of our different interests, we complimented each other's knowledge base really well. We also learned a lot from each other throughout this journey. Since we have also had made it through to the Campus Finale as teammates in other case competitions prior to this, we gelled quite well. Knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses helped us divide the work in a much smoother way.