The overwhelming experience of being the national finalists of Tata Steel-a-thon -By team Oracle from IIM Raipur

We were delighted and surprised when we got to know that our team Oracle has been selected as the national finalists of TATA Steel-a-thon 2020. It was a proud moment for us that we were going to present our solution to the senior management team of TATA Steel, that too in a live event. This news once again reforged the fact that hard work always pays off. 

Steel-a-thon is the flagship event of TATA Steel in which 26 premium Indian B-Schools can participate. We thought this would be an excellent opportunity to work on real-life problems and to prove our mettle in the operations field. Besides rewards, we wanted to experience this journey and the opportunity to showcase our talent was like a cherry on top. 

TATA Steel-a-thon is a competition where every B-school student wants to try their hands on. The experience shared by our seniors in the previous seasons added a boost to it. We wanted to know where we stand among all the students across the premium institutes of the country. 

The sweat shedding process

Our team started at once after the case was released. We studied all the cases and as we knew that our strength was in the operations domain, we narrowed it down to 2 operations cases and finally went ahead with the sustainability case in the Operations domain. All this happened within 4 hours of the case release!

After that, we all studied the case and tried to understand what exactly the case needs. For secondary research, we used TATA steel’s website and did thorough research on sustainable practices used and followed in other industries. On average, every one of us read 50 articles from sites or research papers to get clarity. 

When we felt that we had enough knowledge about this domain we dived into primary research, and for that, we contacted TATA Steel employees, steel dealers, scrap dealers, etc. The primary research exercise helped us track the issue in real-time and practical constraints with our initial solutions. We kept refining our idea as per the feedback of various stakeholders, which proved to be a gamechanger for us.

Challenges we faced

Our team was very cooperative during the entire time. The most important part was that we were always connected on Google meet during the entire course of the event. The fact that we were all working from home did not come as a barrier in our brainstorming sessions and all other discussions. Our sessions were usually 10-12 hours daily. The hardworking attitude to leave all other things aside and stay together on the case made us move forward towards the Grand Finale.

The more challenging part was to get a scalable and implementable solution. We optimized our solution by working on the pros and cons. Our team's strength was coordination, responsibility, and obsession for excellence. We did not face many conflicts, but we were questioning each other’s point of view until we got a common concise which really helped in refining our solution. We resolved our doubts through discussions, and if they still persisted, we discussed it with our mentors to get a better understanding. What we found very useful was to connect with the people from the industry and get an opinion from them.

Technicalities of the competition

There were 12 teams in the Grand finale and we found the Man-a-gers of steel as our competitor since they also worked on the operations domain problem. 

The quality of competition was top notch. All the 12 teams were the best and the level of questions asked was a lot more than we expected. We could see that they analyzed each team’s solutions in a 360-degree aspect and tested our real mettle. The judges’ questions clearly showed their exemplary knowledge in their field. 

Learnings and special moments

I personally had a lot of learning from this event. Starting from understanding the real-world scenario, the data collection methodology and then churning the data into an implementable solution and at last presenting them effectively. We got the answers to some questions like- How to first untangle a problem before directly jumping to find a solution, how to frame the answers, what is the corporate world looking for? We were able to figure out at least some part of these while taking part in this competition. These learnings will surely be useful in our career.

The connection we made with each other will be unforgettable. The most special moment was during the Grand finale when the judges said that they were impressed with our depth of research and wished to connect offline with our team. That was a wonderful feeling.